


The Stolen Galaxy

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Either the World is Broken, or it's Just a Road Trip AU [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Dream Bubbles, F/F, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Heiress Challenge, Horrorterrors - Freeform, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Revolution, Sequel, established relationships - Freeform, fantroll death, glitch universe, headcanons, road trip au, space travel, that tag is still relevant ahahaha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-04-23 07:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 37,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14327913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Gamzee Makara and all his friends have changed their unreal, never-meant-to-be-lived-out world forever - and now, they are so, so close to the final challenge for the future of that  broken Alternia. This journey will involve long-distance feelings jams, dream bubbles leaking in from the furthest void, and an Empress very used to forcing her will on a galaxy that never had to be hers.(Thank you so, so, SO much again, both to everyone who suggested a sequel back with this arc's first story, and everyone who encouraged me as I worked on the second one.  This finale story exists thanks to you all!!  I will do my very best to update it on Sundays!!)





	1. Been a while.

**Author's Note:**

> Ahh, welcome to chapter one of the final fic in this arc!! :O I feel like all the characters have been building up to this for a while now~ Hopefully this'll be fun to read - thank you so much for clicking on the story again. 
> 
> Have a wonderful week!! :')

It felt like so motherfucking long ago, now – that first time their fresh-finned Heiress Feferi Peixes met Her Imperious Condescension to duel for the twisted gold-on-coral crown of bleeding Alternia and all its subjugglated worlds.  Gamzee Makara knew it’d just been a little over a sweep or something, though.  That’s all.  Little over a sweep since they’d gotten back from Earth, the planet that shouldn’t have existed but spun on defiantly anyway, won in a game they’d never up and played…  Little over a sweep since they’d brought the four human heroes home to Alternia and introduced them to that Blue Team left behind to prepare for war.  Dave Strider – the Knight of Time, brother – still wouldn’t eat anything with eyes and/or antennae twitching around, or that might’ve conceivably been given some kinda name by others of its kind.  He seemed surprised by how that limited his motherfucking Alternian cuisine options, but they’d made shit work.

Gamzee’s hair had grown sort of long and tangled down his back while he wasn’t paying attention, though his curls were a little softer than usual that particular night.  He normally tried to clean himself up before visiting his moirail Karkat, after all.  Wasn’t so sticky with smeared-off paint and spilled soda, just then…  Sticky with frozen droplets of sleeping sopor and old flaking blood.  Some of that blood was Gamzee’s, after all, and the sweet crackling smell of it would’ve soaked into the air like that ground-in fear motherfuckers still tended to feel when they saw a worship circus ship – (like the ones Gamzee’d claimed for his own truthful cause, only maybe different inside) – climbing over the skyline.  Dripping rainbow streamers like spurting blood and fluttering gore-splattered polka dots; wearing the split-in-half laugh-screaming face that meant the Mirthful Messiahs’ own fear and frenzy scrawled along the side of their hull.  Didn’t want to make Karkat worry any more than Gamzee knew he already did, right? 

It’d sucked, having to work such far-apart roles in their prophesy, acting out Gl'bgolyb’s whispers like they’d fucking had to.  Everybody, that meant.  Everybody scattered through the warring Empress-es’s stars for hopefully just a little while.  Feferi’s deep-sea horrorterror lusus – all searching tentacles and a hunger that could end Alternia early – had promised them a revolution; she had offered to make Feferi into something arcane and terrifying enough to end the Empress herself.  And Feferi _could do it_ , man.  Gamzee didn’t have any motherfucking doubt in that.  The first challenge, just a little over a sweep ago, yeah, had been so, so close. 

Terezi Pyrope, their Seer of Mind, said it was good things had ended as they did.  They were living in one of the cleanest timelines, she assured everyone, scrawling her miles worth of notes, stretching her Seer magics just as far as they would go into every living things’ motivations and choice-paths.  Chewing on handfuls of Earth gummy candy, and occasionally excusing herself to flop her head down on Jade Harley’s barkbeast-lusus’s fluffy and green electric-crackly side.  Taking deep, shaky breaths.  Reminding herself she was _only_ helping pilot the course for her civilization, and all those countless others the Alternian Empire had brushed against over the thousands of sweeps...  No big motherfucking deal at all.  

One of the cleanest timelines, sure.  That was a new, barely-prophesied miracle, but Gamzee’s role _had_ sent him hurtling around to draw the faithful close.  A role of reinvention and holy anarchy, of trying with everything he had to tear down whatever lies the Condesce’s rule had sewn into the mirthful gospel like a wicked bleeding patchwork.  Written into the holy hymn-raps to make the Mirthful Church her own execution squad.  They hadn’t used to be what they were now, not before Her Imperious Condescension’s reign, and maybe they could still scrap what she’d forcefed them and start fresh somehow. 

That work had taught Gamzee to share his visions of their other lives with motherfuckers outside his own self, chucklevoodoos falling, falling like swimmy spinning carnival lights in his thinkpan, and it had given him a circus troop to worship alongside like what he’d never known before.  But…  And this felt more important, sometimes, when Gamzee was feeling raw and blasphemous…  The work had _also_ sent him way too far from what Karkat was doing with the evacuations and bubbled-off haven cities.  Feferi kept those havens as cut off from the war as possible, which meant Karkat had been pretty motherfucking cut off too, no matter how necessary he was for getting trolls and aliens alike to safety nice and fast.  Gamzee loved his calling, but it wasn’t the only thing he loved.

This was just a trade, Karkat had told him, cupping Gamzee’s cheek in a firm and newly-scarred palm.  A little time sleeping in strangely still, solo recuperacoon-slime now, in exchange for a future.  A little bad reception sending video messages back and forth, for the knowledge that they were part of something that could be grand and galaxy-changing if it didn’t blow up in their motherfucking faces any night now.  Karkat had pulled Gamzee down so he could smooth a little something off his lip; so he could kiss his cheek and provide some more commentary about how gross clown paint tasted.  Only he didn’t really mind, and Gamzee knew it.  Only Karkat liked that Gamzee nodded along, and said he had a Messiahs-blessed point. 

Karkat had snuck Gamzee clearance to come visiting the haven cities any time he could manage it, and whenever Gamzee’s kismesis Equius scolded him for casually abusing the bureaucratic security system of the haven cities – (which you _know_ Equius liked to fucking do) – all Gamzee could think about was how desperately he missed the both of them.  Missed Karkat’s grumbling in the evening, dragging himself out of their recuperacoon; missed the way he murmured contradicting opinions to himself as he scribbled out new drafts of his romantic-comedy screenplays.  Gamzee missed the way Equius got so still and thoughtful, planning out his musclebeast-inspired machines, too – missed the way he snorted surprised disdain through his nose and never sparred _too_ gently with Gamzee, so it was pretty clear he didn’t think he was so sopor-rotted and stumbling that he might break. 

Gamzee missed _all_ his friends, of course.  The Red Team and Blue Team both, carrying out their impossible roles.  A destiny fit for a broken universe; a destiny that had their chat logs filling up super motherfucking fast again, like when they were wigglers and living on different sides of ruined old Alternia.  But all _that_ was changing again, too, and soon.  Terezi said they were inching up on the next step in their story.  Like a new panel, if this had been one of Dave’s surreal webcomics Gamzee laughed at even if he didn’t completely understand them.  They would be together again really motherfucking fast, now, just as soon as everyone got to Karkat’s haven city to hear the next step in their plan.       

It was a little exciting along with the fear and loneliness, seeing what their struggle had brought out in everyone.  Watching Tavros lead his abandoned-lusus army in grainy, battlefront video recordings, like the Summoner with a nervous smile and a hover-wheelchair; watching him commune with alien beasts that might’ve otherwise been left behind by their planets’ fancy civilizations when evacuation time came.  Watching Equius and Jade constructing those haven cities together, using her Witch of Space teleportation technology shit to make the glossy, teasing bubble-domes that would send the Empress’s forces hurtling off somewhere awful if they tried to force their way inside.  Everyone had changed, sure, but not too much.  Gamzee thought it was more like peeling off childhood insecurities, peeling off whatever it was they’d thought they wouldn’t be able to do and wearing their true intentions obvious as clown paint.

Gamzee’d changed, too, of course, though it was a little hard to say exactly how from the inside of his own thinkpan.  He wouldn’t have fit in any vents anymore, that was for fucking sure, whatever ship part he and Aradia Megido might’ve been all trying to steal.  Heists worked different in their new divided Alternia, anyway.  Strung between two queens, queens playing tug-of-war so’s whatever was in the middle might get ripped open all pulpy and thrashing and ragged.  Skin gone sloppy and skull splintering open with a wet crunch like Gamzee’d seen his own motherfucking self get torn in two.  Those dreams, brother.  Of course the dreams hadn’t stopped, no matter how long ago Feferi’d made her first play for the throne.  No matter how close they were to the next panel in the surreal webcomic that was their unchosen, glitch-universe lives.

It had been at the royal challenging ground, of course, ‘cause Feferi wanted to do things right.  When she made the challenge, brother; when she’d tried to take back their world before all this sprawling war. 

Feferi had dusted her scales with gold and agonizing, powdery poisons, in case the Empress decided it might be fun to bite her into wriggling pieces.  Her eyes had been like two dark pits, horrorterrors squirming inside them; her spindly deep-sea fangs had cold void seeping from behind sometimes when she smiled.  Every now and then Feferi had her own soft meat, bioluminescence fluttering through her veins, and every now and then she had an arcane, maybe-monstrous self no one had ever seen manifest completely.  Colder than even her highest blood could ever be.  A self hatched from inside her own mind – through that vow she’d made with the eldritch horrorterror that’d been her own motherfucking lusus. 

Feferi had gone to the challenge ground with a royal trident in her claws and bundles of landdweller flowers braided into her tentacle-twitching hair.  She had stood on that broad and polished mosaic of black and white stone – like Skaia’s battleground in the game they’d never played but all, all of them remembered, Gamzee had thought – and watched the Condesce’s clattering insectoid ship ease itself on to the grey and waiting world. 

A crowd had assembled there, too, quick enough – lots of flashing news site cameras and reporters doing their thing, strangers the Heiress had never met wearing “We’ll Miss You, Feferi” shirts, and some representatives of the Mirthful Church pouring out a little wicked elixir into the dirt to honor what had to come next.  Everyone thinking, _“Look at that Heiress, getting ready to bleed.  Look at that soft and barefoot girl, getting herself all good to die.”_         

Gamzee had been there, Gamzee and all his friends hidden around like a secret armed guard.  Like human chess pieces arranged just how Terezi had told them to be.  Terezi’d only given them all their individual pieces of the plan, so Gamzee mostly knew he was supposed to wait with Karkat, watching from a place not too far beneath the ground.  A coiling tunnel the metal skin-bound human John Egbert had pumped full of air using those windy thing/Heir of Breath powers he’d been practicing on their journey back from Earth.  Could breathe wherever the fuck you needed to, if only he stirred up that motherfucking breath.  That’s what would keep so many of the haven cities going, after all, once what happened on that challenge-ground played out its course. 

If the Empress’s guards did any of the things on a list Terezi had passed Gamzee, he was supposed to either unravel whatever of the Condesce’s army he could with his giggling, bleary brain-magics, his darkest chucklevoodoos, or climb up from beneath the world and start smashing skulls like dropped and rotten fruit.  He didn’t end up doing either of those things, though.  Maybe in a different, unlived timeline, huh?  Maybe in another equally-broken world that couldn’t be Gamzee’s truth, either. 

“The Empress takes for-fucking-ever to land her ship, apparently,” Karkat had said.  He was a little pissed off that his Terezi-assigned job had been just to watch this time, and maybe shove Gamzee into action if he missed one of the things on the list.  “We all know she likes being the center of attention, but this is _clearly_ creeping beyond ‘raising tension’ territory and into ‘melodrama.’”

“You’re probably right,” Gamzee said, though he liked watching divine melodramas a fuck ton more than he’d ever like Her Imperious Condescension.  He slumped way, way over so’s he could rest his head against Karkat’s shoulder for just a second.  His moirail was so motherfucking warm, and his breaths were so fast, and Gamzee knew Karkat would twine an arm part of the way around him and squeeze gently no matter how peeved he was at the Empress’s dramatic slow-mo entrance.

Gamzee remembered he was thinking about how unafraid and resigned Feferi looked right that second, on the screen they were watching her from.  He thought about the heroes they had fought their way to Earth for, who’d just barely gotten used to Alternia by that point and were spread around waiting for the worst just like everybody else.  Knight of Time; Witch of Space.  Seer of Light; Heir of Breath.  Feferi’s centuries-ancient and scheming lusus had said they couldn’t steal Alternian space back without those four specifically, though Gamzee knew he couldn’t have all the pieces to that motherfucking riddle yet. 

And so the Empress’s ship eased its ponderous, taunting way up to the crowd, and Gamzee could hear her psionic helmsmen’s screams cutting off deep in its gleaming insides.  He could imagine them gasping for hot, rattling breaths, eyelids scorched and bloody from all the crackling electricity in their minds, powering the ship onward.  Gamzee thought maybe he saw Sollux Captor – the Heiress’s only moirail, still, and possibly the only one there who knew how truly afraid she might have been – shift a little uncomfortably from his place at Feferi’s righthand side.  Sollux’s own psionics flickered, like the nervousness Feferi was trying with all her newly-won, ageless danger not to feel. 

Gamzee had been able to taste fear soaked so, so deep in the air, then.  Fear like syrup, fear enough to drown in.  And then Her Imperious Condescension had climbed from the ship, with her guards and her consorts.  Her play-things and the pretty, painted strangers who smeared glitter on her razor-sharp, throat-slitting claws. 

Alternia’s Empress had lived through so many centuries.  She had swallowed so many worlds.  She smirked at Feferi and made a whimsical fish pun before swinging her trident like a flash of molten, merciless sunlight.     

But where that royal trident _might_ have pierced Feferi like a dripping hole in her chest – (just the way Gamzee sometimes dreamt her in their other lives) – Feferi Peixes did not die.  She was the Witch of Life, and she had made deals no whispering-void horrorterrors had ever offered the Condesce.  Feferi tore the Empress’s trident out from between her ribs, between her glinting, poison-dusted scales, and swung it as her own.  The gaudy fuchsia gems along its staff looked bright and sour enough to be their own shared blood. 

Feferi and Her Imperious Condescension fought, and Alternia held its breath.  Literally, in Karkat’s case.  Gamzee actually had to pat his back all heavy and be like, “Stay with me, bro?” about halfway through. 

They shattered the battleground chessboard, in the end, the same way Gamzee dreamt sometimes of a shattered and flashing sky.  But finally, the end of things. 

This is where it happened:

Feferi had the Condesce cornered, flat on her back, a bare webbed foot pressing hard into her gold-strung neck.  She raised that gleaming trident up above her head, and stared down with eyes gone almost unliving.  Eyes too full of stars.

That was when the Empress pressed a button worked into the silken finger of her gloves.  That was when she fired some of the bright-scorching weapons hidden all through her ship’s own scales, and so much of the crowd was burned to screaming ash.  The Condesce traded her own people for a chance to escape, just the same way Gamzee and Karkat were trading so many sleepy-comfortable movie nights for a revolution.  What the fuck else would a queen like this one do?  Aside from following the motherfucking rules of Heiress-challenge combat…  Aside from taking the hand their broken universe had dealt her and bleeding for her planet to change.  The Condesce had been cheated out of the game that could have been their purpose, too, after all – back when she’d worn a simple Alternian name instead of a title fit for the conqueror of worlds, and she’d been an Heiress her own self.

But of course, Feferi turned to the sacrificed, next, as the Empress fled.  She turned to those still clutching at their half-shredded-off and smoking skin.  Life, reaching out her hands the way Aradia had stretched her fingers to gather the dead in a human graveyard not too, too long before then.  A different sort of queen.

A queen who – as Terezi had arranged that shit – could be seen by all of Alternia asking that same Aradia Megido to hold time as still as she could around all those bleeding innocents.  Aradia had trained with Dave wandering dead moons, hadn’t she?  Time and death were bound together, and she had grown up seeking out buried things, bones picked clean under the dizzy spinning moonlight.  Feferi was seen asking John to feed her people breath and cleansing, too; asking her own frozen magic to gasp whoever she could back into the world.  Giving what she could of the Life that was her hatch-right, just the same as any motherfucking crown.

It meant something that the Condesce had disregarded traditions; it meant something that she had run the fuck away.  But she hadn’t been fucking _culled_ , and so some of Alternia stayed loyal like a clown to their own battered and dead-broke circus.  Clinging to her out of love or fear or something else, something as starved for blood as her own empirical machine, maybe.  Something like faith: the doctrine of Alternia.  It _also_ meant something that Feferi had nearly won the challenge, though, and so plenty of Alternia had split off to call her Empress, too.  Her Undying Reinvention; Her Ethereal Resurrection.  And that was the war, wasn’t it?  That was the war Gamzee’s Red Team had always known they were flying home to tangle themselves up in no matter what it took.  

The Condesce had been sowing pain, spreading warnings where she could.  Moons melted from deep inside, so cities caved and not even bones were left for people like Aradia to gather and bury somewhere.  Ships grabbed hold of, ships steered into each other and shuddering into sparks and stinging mechanical-blood and pain, so the last things Feferi’s believers thought as they died might’ve been about why their own friends had decided to kill them.  _“This is what happens when you serve an usurper, that unchosen queen,”_ Her Imperious Condescension declared, in a voice that echoed hollowly throughout all her stars.  _“Did you think I couldn’t make you glubbing bleed, anymore?”_   Anymore – Any-moray.  It was strange, hearing the same fish puns out of both queens’ spindly-fanged mouths.

 Equius and Jade built the haven cities, to usher Feferi’s people somewhere safe where they might not get culled so messily.  The “death throes of an empire,” Equius called it, sounding curious and maybe a little sad.  Karkat was a leader now, just like Terezi had said he would be, and not in some way he’d ever imagined: he organized the evacuations, and hid those motherfuckers away just how he’d had to hide himself before his eyes turned bright, impossible red.  Like everything was coming together, somehow – like their lives had prepared them to be what they needed to invent their own Alternia.  Still hadn’t found Her Imperious Condescension yet, though.  Still hadn’t brought her back in chains to get motherfucking challenged by Feferi one more time, so the ritual could finally be complete.  So the war could be ended, and Gamzee could go home to Karkat Vantas again.

His worship circus ship was getting closer to Karkat’s haven city, now, and his hair and motherfucking clothes were all washed and ready.  A couple of his new churchmates commented on it, actually, as Gamzee stalked through the big top at the ship’s own paint-smeary heart.  They’d been practicing a tumbling act, something in honor of brotherhood and acceptance from long, long before any hymn-raps were sung about being the Empress’s own divine attack-barkbeasts.  They were sticky with Faygo and glittery special stardust, laughing as they stumbled over one another, the ship a spinning tent all above them.  Blood-splattered and cozy, with glassy stripes cut through polka dots and harlequin paint to let in the stars.  

The clown girl whose lusus was a skittering, slimily-amphibious centipede smiled with all her dozens of tiny fangs, grabbing Gamzee’s hand and squeezing it just a little as he walked by.  “He’s gonna be so happy to see you!” she’d chirped, and Gamzee’d said, “Hey, thanks, sis,” sounding a little shyer than he honestly meant to.  

She laughed at that, and said, “Aw, but you _know_ he will be.  Don’t think we didn’t notice the sappy audio recording Karkat sent you earlier…  Gamzee.  Come on.”

It was true: Karkat had sent a message, and Gamzee’d listened to it with his eyes squeezed shut and a soft, smooth-paint smile on.  That girl had been with him since nearly the beginning of this new preaching, this new doctrine, so maybe it made sense she would’ve cared.  Her hair was tied up with squiggly rainbow yarn; her chucklevoodoos were such creeping, deadly things, slithering just about anywhere as fast as thinking.  Her dance partner had on an intricately painted-up porcelain jester mask, cracked and pasted back together after so many battles.  Faithfully.  Carefully, the pieces harvested up from underneath the dead.  Their names were Heceta and Jestif; they were a couple of the new family in faith Gamzee had been learning to know, and Karkat remembered all their favorite Faygo flavors.  Gamzee was still a little motherfucking baffled by all that noise.  By all that commitment and safety he was flying to meet right fucking then.

Maybe his shipmates could tell how he felt, at least a little.  The soda-sharp bubbling anxiousness in his chest, now that they were getting close to this next stage of their war.  Now that everything might become new, again, and full of strange miracles that could swing the balance for Feferi or Her Imperious Condescension once and for all.  A second challenge; a second chance to cull the Empress.  They could probably taste his fear over the blood-sweet smell of that big top, over the popcorn shuffled under the empty rows and rows of bleachers meant for an audience.  Over the laughing-gas potion vials Jestif wore strapped in a bandolier over their chest, with their sacred honk-horns and that tiny-murder guitar strung across their back. 

They asked if Gamzee maybe wanted to sit and watch them practice; they asked if maybe he wanted to juggle with them, too, calming his fucking self down before they landed at Equius’s predictably rigorous haven city security checkpoint. 

Gamzee said sure – that sort of thing could usually help him out – and the worship circus ship barreled on, and then…   _Then_ …  They were there.      


	2. Haven cities, dream bubbles – do you think they’re kinda similar, in a way?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!! :D Happy Sunday, again~ (Also, happy Earth Day? and Jellybean Day??? I looked up "April 22 holidays" and those came up, so... Time to plant some jellybeans, I guess!!) Thank you so so much for clicking on this story again, and I hope you have fun with chapter 2.

From the outside, sort-of-Empress Feferi Peixes’s haven cities looked all warped and shivery, distorted by the teleportation forcefield stuff Jade had built to keep them gathered up tight.  Like a crystal ball; like a prophesy.  A blessed, Messiahs-sent vision of what motherfucking peace might be to come.  Gamzee thought they were like a heat mirage stretching out along Earth Texas’s skyline – he thought they looked so glassy and fragile he might’ve crushed them up between his claws to see what oily iridescent rainbows they bled…  Or tossed ‘em around as giddy and whimsical as Alternia’s own juggled moons.  You know.

This haven city they were headed into now had been hidden on a ghost-moon – a pocket of blurry life and warbling laughter, surrounded by rubble and the dead.  The salt-gritty remains of one of Her Imperious Condescension’s now-drained seas.  Kinda beautiful, in its way.  Like someone’d hung a necklace on a bare and nameless skeleton.  Probably Aradia – that sounded like the sort of thing she’d up and do. 

Anyway, Gamzee flashed the entrance pass Karkat had given him, and Gamzee let the security crew Equius’d stationed there put him through the works.  They monitored all visitors for signs of brain control or hatchright-magic – they re-took fingerprints and drew out tiny vials of everybody’s blood…  Stuff like that.  Filed ‘em away for some kinda records.  In case shit went sour as rotting meat forgotten and melty under the big top floormats.  All that had been Terezi and Equius’s idea, way back when, and Gamzee’d been sort of quietly offended the first couple times his crew got checked.  Sure, Karkat probably could’ve magicked _him_ a way out of most security station shit, but what happened to Gamzee’s circus had better fucking happen to him, too.  It was only fair, and it wasn’t like Gamzee didn’t trust his own motherfucking clowns in faith, you know?

But then, a couple haven cities got torn apart from the inside, brother: they were like one of those unlucky blasphemers ripped to splatters of wet and faceless meat on a murder clown’s horror carnival ride.  They were warning stories everybody else whispered from haven city to haven city, talking about bodies mangled in the streets and Her Imperious Condescension’s voice in the air and those teleportation forcefields deactivated so the Empress could wipe the whole place clean and gone.  Vriska and Terezi had apprehended the culprits, eventually – or at least, most of them. 

The security stations got even more motherfucking intense after that, and Gamzee handed over his blood a lot more easily.  Equius only monologued about how _strong_ his devotion to wartime safety was every now and then. 

Eventually, Gamzee’s worship circus got past all that security shit and dropped their paint-smudged ship off at the hangar thing.  Everybody stumbled into the haven city its own meandering self, then, blinking the light out of their motherfucking eyes or ducking away to reapply clown paint.  Tangled-up streets, there, you know, with cultures gathered close together and willing to compromise in a way Equius might’ve thought was motherfucking obscene once upon a time.  Sort of amazing, how he was helping keep the whole place running, instead, now.  Gamzee was honestly proud of his kismesis, wanting to protect people he might’ve lorded his blood over not too long ago…  Though Equius had just tried to teach Gamzee how to step up his _own_ revolutionary game, when he said shit like that.  A defense mechanism, Gamzee’d thought, ‘cause Equius had been fiddling with his long greasy ponytail all awkward and half-smiling, too. 

The haven cities were almost like Gamzee’s visions of a paradise planet to come, in a way – reflected back wonky in a funhouse mirror, but possibly…  Slowly…  On their way to coming true.  Someday, when Feferi could lower Jade’s teleportation tech forcefields; someday, when every motherfucker could decide for themselves where to live.  Once Feferi had claimed whatever worlds the Empress had drowned – once she’d offered back homes to whoever she could.  Rebuilt what she could manage, too, you know?  Regrown with the uncanny Life in her blood.   So much had been flooded and crushed into itself, swarmed by cackling death clowns and twisted apart like a puzzle toy.  But if the war was won…  If Feferi could do her best to keep all the promises she was making, before – as she said it – her “debts had to be paid…”

Who knew what their galaxy could become?

That change felt so fresh and possible, sometimes.  Felt possible when Gamzee saw how trolls from different sides of Alternia lived stacked in the same communal hive stems around the haven cities, you know?  Seadwellers next to muscle-bound highbloods – next to psionics – next to that one bronze summoner with her respite block full of softly whispering birds…  Next to aliens that’d accepted rescue off of worlds taken in blood and subjugglating ruin by the Condesce.  Beings that drank light and laughed like the sound of restless, cold, cold wind; beings stuck together out of motherfucking moss, trailing sap behind them wherever they went.  So many creatures breathing together, though Gamzee knew they hadn’t always been built for the same air.  John Egbert’s Heir of Breath magics filled all their lungs, though, just the fucking same. 

Gamzee hoped that kinda change was possible, anyway, walking those living streets with his hair all brushed and clean and his clown shoes only occasionally getting stepped on.  He poured out his faith, ‘cause what else could he do?  There was war-torn urgency in the haven cities, mashed all together with a sense of home.  Hundreds of alien languages and Alternian accents, played over each other until they might almost drown out the Condesce’s own voice.

Lots of paths wound through that particular haven city, Gamzee knew, but he was gonna sway straight for the Alternian Consulate down the clearest way he’d learned.  Of course he was, ‘cause that’s where Karkat would be waiting.  Climbing his way out of piles of unread messages, unfinished expedition logs and shit like that…  Making damn sure all the cities were hidden as they should be.  As Karkat would’ve had to keep his own self back home, in a world that hadn’t learned to accept his so-warm, salt-sweet mutant blood.  The closer Gamzee got to Karkat Vantas, the softer he felt, somewhere inside: the more at motherfucking peace, like those two halves of their diamond were clicking together again true and unforgotten as the oldest gospels. 

That diamond was always propping Gamzee up, somehow, when he preached what the Condesce called blasphemy…  That diamond helped keep him believing in his own worth even when he remembered the sopor-abuse bruises all mushy around his skull and wondered if – maybe – another clown’s act might’ve been better for their should-be-impossible cause.  He knew Karkat had decided to believe in him, even back when he’d _also_ said he had to be a fucking idiot to do a ridiculous thing like that.  Karkat had smeared pain relief stuff into those sopor bruises when they were still raw and flowering, when Gamzee was nearly gone and could barely string his words together at all.  So long ago, now, but Karkat had _been there_.  And Karkat was here, now, on this ghost-moon.  Karkat was expecting him. 

The Alternian Consulate wasn’t exactly the most inviting tourist-ish spot, though, of course – most of Gamzee’s shipmates waved all cheerfully at him and peeled away to meet up with their own important people, or maybe check out some alien shops.  Jestif was always hunting for new chemical brews they could mix into their explosive brain-fuckery vials – shit like that.  A couple clowns pointed over to a herd of jumbled food stands, asked if anybody wanted something.  Gamzee just might have, except that it was better thinking he’d get food with Karkat soon enough.  Sometimes his moirail had pie or something so achingly familiar waiting for him, ready to get all warmed up special.  Shit he said he never would’ve bought, except that Gamzee was coming by. 

The official Alternian Consulate was sort of frenzied when Gamzee got there: a mess of blinking screens with text whirring across too fast for him to read, and lots of scribbly maps pinned up almost everywhere.  The Condesce was making a play for some ponderous old seadweller city-ship, apparently, full of drowned luxurious hallways stuffed to the gills with waterproofed supplies some of the haven cities really fucking needed.  Karkat had just sent a fleet to intercept – Gamzee heard about it on the way down to his moirail’s office.  And you know, Karkat had _also_ sent a strongly-worded letter Her Imperious Condescension’s forces weren’t ever gonna read.  He probably couldn’t resist, even after all this time.

Karkat met Gamzee in the hall about halfway to his office.  It looked like he’d just been running, and then suddenly realized maybe his past self would’ve been embarrassed by that.  Karkat’s hair was ruffled up and his uniform had been buttoned sort of crooked.  He sized Gamzee up and then let out a huffing breath.  Grinned.

“Doesn’t look like you have any broken bones, this time,” Karkat said.  Gruffly – warm and quick as his blood.  Gamzee nodded, and Karkat added, “ _Good_.  Do you realize there were _two_ false alarms for your worship circus ship arriving before you just now fucking got here?  I didn’t know if I should even believe it.”

Karkat pulled Gamzee in close – held him there in the hallway for a long time.  People scooted awkwardly around them, but didn’t say a motherfucking word.  It had been a fair, aching while since they’d been near in the flesh like that, brother; Karkat hissed some pent-up frustrations into Gamzee’s ear before they let go.  Some stuff they’d talked about before that still hadn’t left him the fuck alone…  Like how exhausting it was trying to convince the douchey voice in his head of how he wasn’t just sitting around being useless, watching ships and battles and daring escapes on all his screens…  And some pretty new shit, too, like how frustratingly bad his aides apparently were at identifying different clown ships from far away, and how much some of them liked getting his hopes up. 

It was always a wonder, Gamzee thought, feeling how their diamond might’ve propped Karkat up, too.  Just the same as him, maybe, and Karkat led him around by the crook of his giant, swinging arm like he might’ve actually been proud to have him there.  Took him to get something to eat, just like Gamzee’d thought he would; left his eager, clown ship-spotting aides to take control for a little while.  Karkat was probably gonna be up answering memos ages before Gamzee climbed out of their recuperacoon, but they _did_ have a little time before Terezi’s next planning session.  Before they met up with whichever of their friends could make it to that particular haven city, and learned all about those next stages in their broken universe’s war.

They traded stories while they could – they traded secrets Gamzee’d had to keep his mouth motherfucking stitched shut about even around his own clown family.  There were some things only Karkat should hear – some pain he’d remembered from their other lives, some thoughts he wished he could hack out of his brain like shredded flailing meat.  Gamzee showed off a couple new, non-murderous juggling tricks he’d learned, and Karkat walked him through detailed descriptions of all his aides in order from most competent (currently managing the seadweller city-ship rescue) to least competent (not even allowed to prepare Terezi’s candy stash for her before the big meeting.)  

When Karkat fell asleep slumped over on Gamzee’s arm, Gamzee held as still as he could and watched the life moving outside Karkat’s respite block window.  Listened to his rescued crab-lusus screeching; listened to music drifting through the glass…  There were so many songs with alien lyrics Gamzee’s Alternian vocal chords couldn’t have possibly sung along with, and he thought that was kind of miraculous in itself.  Never heard those songs back on old Alternia, under the Condesce’s rule. 

Karkat’s respite block was a cramped, almost-empty thing.  Not meant to be lived in too motherfucking long – but he had some sappy romcom DVDs lying around ready to watch, even so, and that group shot they’d taken on a nature hike pinned up right by the recuperacoon.  Karkat, Eridan, Sollux and Gamzee, all on their way to the Juggling Eclipse, back at the start of it all.  Aw, man.  After all that had happened – all that was happening just motherfucking then – it was really no wonder Karkat was so tired.   

When the time seemed about right, Gamzee stirred Karkat awake and they both got ready for Terezi’s meeting together.  Her house sign was engraved on the fancy door when they got there; her scribbled-chalk notetaking had already scratched its way all over the walls.  The ceiling, too, which was pretty impressive…  Though Terezi and Dave had mostly just written cryptically ironic jokes up there and/or drawn commentary from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.  They’d been the first ones in that meeting room, getting everything set up and plotting together in low voices. 

Once or twice, Gamzee thought he heard Dave reassure Terezi that they were on the right path.  That he had faith in her Seer of Mind shit, though he didn’t say so in those same motherfucking words.  Straight-faced, over-the-top reassurances, see?  Sort of maybe just trying to make her laugh in his “coolkid” way.  Or he’d say stuff like, “Yeah, yeah.  Of course I remember the order I’m supposed to pass you all our _oh-so-zany_ explanation props…  And no, I’m definitely not just gonna pass you Equius’s weird horse sculptures over and over.  Who do you think I am, TZ?  We’re running a fucking professional revolution, here.”

“You better not, Strider,” Terezi said, but her lips were peeling back into the sort of smile that showed more fangs than Gamzee’d learned most of their human friends knew what to do with…  Daring Dave to just motherfucking try.  Terezi’d given Karkat a half-hug when they came in, and brushed some chalk on his cheek by accident; she’d told Gamzee he looked about as enormous and potentially-threatening as she’d expected, and dragged him down so she could ruffle up his hair a little like old times.

There was something stinging and sweet like sopor pie, watching all their friends gather there.  A few at a time, until the room was nearly full…  Sollux teasing Eridan about the Hero of Hope getup he’d taken to wearing into battle, aristocratic diamond-studded cape and all; Rose typing away at something she’d referred to so motherfucking mysteriously as “session notes.”  Tavros had read a little of that shit, though, and he’d sworn Rose was talking to a lot of other universes’ Rose Lalonde-s somehow – giving ‘em a rundown of what all had happened to them so far, that sort of thing.  The weird part was, wherever Rose uploaded her “session notes,” sometimes other Rose-s managed to message back advice. 

Speaking of Tavros, he was around, too, introducing Aradia to some oozing half-rotten alien beasts he’d communed with during a recent evacuation.  Merging both their interests, in a way.  Death and beasts; Time and Breath.  Tavros’d messaged Gamzee about it before, all excited like he was sure his moirail was gonna love them. 

Actually, almost all Gamzee’s old friends were around on that dead-moon somewhere, crowding back together like there were some things that just couldn’t motherfucking change no matter how much their bleeding galaxy shifted itself around.  Vriska hadn’t been able to show, though, ‘cause she was already in on her Scourge Sister’s plan and off setting up the pieces…  And Equius was away at the haven city’s holding cell, apparently, monitoring one of the Condesce’s captured generals.  People told Gamzee he’d learn all he had to know about _that_ soon enough – he had a part to play, too, there, Terezi said, and she said it in a voice that meant she was maybe even a little sorry. 

That must’ve been why Equius hadn’t told Gamzee any of what he’d been up to sooner – he wasn’t the sort of kismesis who had a thing for giving painful news.

And Feferi…  Fuck, it would’ve been an absolute miracle if Fef could’ve clawed herself away from all Her Imperious Condescension’s taunting…  All her bedazzled, gold-plated fear.  Feferi couldn’t leave her armies, though – the frozen churning horrorterror void she’d gathered inside herself said that to hesitate now might mean the end. 

It had been a rough choice for Sollux to leave his moirail’s side, honestly, even over just this little, little while, but apparently both Eridan and Feferi had agreed he needed a breather.  And if anyone could’ve nagged Sollux into it, well – Eridan _had_ coaxed him into taking trips before.  Gamzee’d borne motherfucking witness.  Maybe they’d finally made some time for that piloting simulation winner-take-all showdown they were always hissing threats back and forth about – might’ve been good, right? 

One of Sollux’s stretched and brittle arms was twined along the back of Eridan’s chair, anyway, and he didn’t look nearly as weirded out by the flock of whispering, deathly-bright “angels” Eridan had gathered from that place between universes – (from their true world’s game, where his other self had tried slaughtering all the motherfucking things) – as most everybody else did.  Gamzee had seen video footage of Eridan taking on one of Her Imperious Condescension’s battle fleets with a crew made up exclusively of those winding, serpentine “angels.”  It had been like something out of a nightmare – like watching the world peel back around that ship into only wrath and radiance, only light and light and light. 

Aradia and Terezi tallied up their “Days Saved” by either Team Charge or the Scourge Sisters lists – (they were doing some kinda wager, Vriska’s idea) – and Jade showed Nepeta how to work the new electrifying mechanical claws she’d built her.  Everybody said their hellos and listened to corny jokes John Egbert had found in the books Jade used to leave by his human grave.  You know, up and remembering each other.  Remembering what they’d all been like before, when their lives were simpler and not so stretched out across the galaxy.  Gamzee was talking to Kanaya – asking about how it had been to design Feferi’s armies’ new and defiant uniforms – when Terezi called for some quiet. 

Terezi drew all their eyes up to fix on her, glued tight like the eyes of that long-ago clown prophet Heceta knew a shit ton of hymn-raps about.  That motherfucker who’d sealed his eyes shut ‘cause of a vow to see nothing but harshwhimsical divinity for all time, you know?  Terezi explained how their strategy meeting would be “very generously” followed up by a mandatory read-through of her and Dave’s new masterpiece comic – _Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff vs. the Infamous Senator Lemonsnout._ She paused for applause.  Cleared her motherfucking throat a little.

And then, after some hesitant clapping and lots of mutters like, _“How long is that comic, do you think?”_ Terezi told them what was up.

__She and Rose together – Rose Lalonde, their human Seer with all her velvety smiles, with her impossible game notes spanning so many lives – had found Her Imperious Condescension’s own mortal, killable self.  Her cold, sharp royal heart, pumping that sour-candy fuchsia blood she and Feferi shared.

They had known for ages how Alternia’s Empress wasn’t commanding her armies in the flesh – everybody’d known _that_.  She was hiding herself away, projecting that voice of hers, projecting her will and puppeting her faithful.  The Condesce was hiding from Feferi’s ascension.  Hiding from her own gilded trident skewered deep in her meat and twisted until she grew terrible and colder and still.  But until so, so recently, no one could’ve realized where Her Imperious Condescension had run: it wasn’t anywhere in all their motherfucking universe.  Or, it hadn’t been.  Not at first, Terezi said.  Not until only…  Just…  Now.

Her Imperious Condescension had made a deal like what Feferi did, a deal with those waiting eldritch gods bound to her through frozen blood.  She had asked the horrorterrors to build a sanctuary out of her own mind, crystalline and dangling in their furthest void.  Dream bubbles, right?  Like the ones they’d built in that other life, keeping the drained-eyed dead cupped safe inside and pooling all their memories together into something merciful and new. 

The horrorterrors had listened to their Empress, their unchosen daughter, and they’d gathered her close with all those tentacles fearful enough to strangle galaxies.  But they didn’t tell her everything they could’ve.  Nah, they didn’t tell her how Feferi had made her _own_ vows to that lusus they’d shared, and how they, too, were helping steal the universe back in their quiet, unnatural ways.  The horrorterrors had handed Rose Lalonde’s mind over easily when Tavros asked, you know?  And now, those dream bubbles were seeping back into the mortal world, though the Condesce didn’t realize it yet.  Slowly, like a stain. 

Terezi saw choice-paths, watching those dream bubbles hang suspended and shimmering at the furthest, furthest edge of Alternian space.  They were only just barely reachable – almost not real motherfucking _things_ at all.  She’d watched choice-paths play out where a crew went inside that poisoned royal mind and dragged the Empress out in chains.  Ready to face Feferi again – ready to be called by her simple Heiress name one more time before she died. 

And that, Terezi said, was what it looked like they were gonna have to fucking do.  Don’t worry.  She and Dave had all the details – or at least, a few of them and some explanation props, which had to be about as good given the circumstances.

Gamzee glanced over to Karkat, all abrupt, you know, and judging by his moirail’s expression there must’ve been something like laughing death in his eyes.  In truth, Gamzee was trying to imagine what it might’ve been like inside Her Imperious Condescension’s mind.  All that slaughter and want made manifest, made real enough to touch and drown in.  Inside some teammates’ minds, too – inside his _own_ thinkpan, even, and all those other selves’ fearful split-in-half scream laughing memories.  Inside his own thinkpan most of all.  It tasted like fear all through; tasted like panic, and the kind of murder frenzy a brother sometimes needed to get his ass talked down from very softly.  

Karkat pulled Gamzee’s hand into his own under the table, and kept on holding it until the raging twist of his lip steadied itself out.  Their team’s Seers would give them everything there was to know, and maybe the Messiahs would be a little kind.   


	3. Oh shit... I didn’t just fuck over the Mirthful Church somehow, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiiii~ full disclosure: I’ve been traveling all day, and finished editing this on a plane ahahaha. I truly, truly hope it turned out okay - I’m gonna be reading through for typos later, again. Ahhhhh I’m sorry this is getting posted so late. It’s been a super long day. 
> 
> Also.... this OC. I wanted someone to represent the other side of the Mirthful Church. :) Ahhh, sorry, this is introducing the arc between him and Gamzee so he gets a little spotlight for some of this. His name... idk. :p I mean it to look like a modified “chimera”. Hopefully it’ll make sense by the end. 
> 
> Thank you so so much for your patience, and for reading!!

Equius, Nepeta, Rose, Kanaya and Dave.  Those were the motherfuckers Terezi’d seen the gentlest choice-paths for, making their way through the Condesce’s crystallized, leviathan mind. Her dream bubbles, hanging caught between the horroterrors’ void and Alternia’s warring space.  Gamzee didn’t get to looking in any of their eyes when she said all that, though, ‘cause he’d have hated anyone but Karkat to see the relief on his face.  He would have gone, you know.  If prophesy demanded; if his friends nudged his back and told him to breathe deep and contemplate on the mirthful gospels if it helped.  He would’ve gone willingly into Her Imperious Condescension’s dream bubbles and hoped his clutching other-world memories kept to their own damn selves.                  

He could wade through the Condesce’s dreams, he thought, as if through a creaking death-swamp carnival like what squelched deep in Alternia’s mainland: woozy park ride lights through the fog and all those tangled, rot-smelling vines.  Clowns reaching out of the mud to stir your blood into the bog water, and all.  Those queenly memories would be horror and hate, but at least there might be no floppy cotton puppet arms stretching through the dark like they knew him, like they were Gamzee’s own arms, his carved-up soul... Squeezing around his neck as that other self carried Lil Cal on his back, so much friendlier than in Dave Strider’s memories.  No refrigerator prisons, either, smelling heavy inside, decay soaked in deep and a half-hearted antibacterial wipedown somewhere on top, dangling like a loose bandage.  Gamzee could just imagine everybody on the whole ship waking up in the dark of that dream bubble, maybe, and hearing “honk” in their own creaking voices whatever the fuck they were actually trying to say.  Everybody trapped in other-Gamzee’s fear; everybody feeling whatever smothering prophesy had gotten him so scabbed over with Nepeta’s blood.   

Gamzee knew all his friends had toxic, tucked-away memories – how could they not, with their true universe selves and that deadly, stunted godhood?  Battles won and selves lost; worlds destroyed and created practically at the same motherfucking time.  Shit.  But whatever Gamzee’s secrets were, they had scared his friends enough to lock him up.  Wouldn’t have stuck him in the fridge on some kinda motherfucking whim, right?  Karkat wouldn’t have done something so unfunny and hurting to a brother he could’ve been pale for.  Gamzee believed in that, even talking about some other universe’s Karkat Vantas.  Felt right, by now.

Even if that other self just couldn’t be real so far as he was concerned - _wasn’t allowed to be fucking real,_ get it? - Gamzee wasn’t sure he wanted to know what had gotten his moirail to give up on him.Wasn’t sure he wanted to live out that self in memory - slip on his meat like a second set of bones.It felt like the dream bubbles might give him too much of himself.Might give everyone, everyone just too motherfucking much.   

So Gamzee would’ve gone, sure, but for a little, teasing while he felt airy inside knowing he’d have some different roles to play.  Thought he got lucky – ready for Mirthful Church business.  Shitthat might not add to his list of reasons to freak out at his own self, thrashing around so’s sleeping sopor splashed all fizzing and oozy on the floor. 

Gamzee admired the way Nepeta purred a little bloody-fanged enthusiasm, though, ready to play her part.She didn’t know any kinda fear of it, at least not in the same deep, stomach-turning way he did.She clicked her new electrically-charged claws against the table, too…  Tiny sparks, see?  Tiny sparks that’d sizzle into something worse if Nepeta wanted – the smell of charred meat in the air, tangling with the wicked fear-smells and bones crumbling up like smoking charcoal.  Gamzee could just about smell it, even then.  

He let his eyes drift around the table only a bit, as Terezi and Dave kept on with their act. Cycling through their props; teasing each other so Terezi cackled and slowly, slowly loosened up her shoulders.When was the last time she’d slept through a whole motherfucking day?Gamzee didn’t think he recognized all his friends’ expressions, honestly - this was the last leap, and some people would have to learn different versions of themselves all over again once the war was won.Or, you know... Or, you know, they’d die, and the Alternian Empire would try its best to forget them. 

Kanaya was glancing all nervous and hopeful over at Rose Lalonde, was one of the first things that really stuck in Gamzee’s head.They were sitting right next to each other, after all, and the gauzy moth-wing drifting of Kanaya’s sleeves kept brushing against his motherfucking arm.  Kanaya didn’t get why Rose was shy around her, not completely…  What all she maybe had to say that she wasn’t saying, or that they both remembered only a little, little bit, like a painfully sweet old song.  Those two hadn’t gotten a ton of time on their own together, yet – Rose had told Tavros she wanted to “make herself right” before trying to know the Kanaya Maryam that had haunted, had intoxicated her novels.  And that was all well and motherfucking good, you know.  Gamzee wasn’t gonna presume to tell a once-horrorterror-possessed sister what all to do with her own self.  What the fuck did he know about being Rose Lalonde?                

But that said…  Karkat had told him some things, now and then.  Enough to know Kanaya was probably smoothing down her thinkpan a little, just now.  Getting herself ready to be part of Rose’s team.  They had to talk a little – or a lot, maybe – out wandering in such a deadly, dreaming mind.  Kanaya was hoping as much, even Gamzee could tell that shit.                

The whole journey gave Gamzee something new to worry about, for motherfucking sure.  So many people he would get his own ass culled for willingly, heading into hateful dream bubbles like that.  Something else to pray to those hopefully-listening murderous twofold messiahs for… Some other whimsical offerings to choreograph in worship circus shows over all these nights to come: begging protection, begging wholeness and victory.  Begging everything good he could think of, brother, and find the words to rhyme.               

So Gamzee listened through Terezi’s explanation of their final stretch, their final challenge, and then got himself pulled aside to learn his own role. There were a couple stages to that role, turned out: Terezi told him he’d be sort of like a motherfucking troll taxi, first off, which’d actually make for a pretty good show. 

See, usually only the faithful got to step foot in one of those holy Mirthful Church ships, unless they were gonna end up all adding a new gore-painting to their walls, maybe, or getting themselves fed to some ringmaster’s lusus in a laughing beast-tamer show.  Intestines strung like colorful bleeding ropes for a little swinging, still wet and warmer than any of the clown hands that knotted them up in the big top rafters.  Gamzee’d never had rules like that shit, though – (Karkat had been in his worship circus plenty of times, brother, and said it was enormous and messier than he’d even imagined) – and using his flags and stuff would send a message Terezi said could be important in getting their Heiress’s changes to stick.  They’d load the worship circus ship up in front of that whole watching haven city, and if the Condesce was truly dragged back…  If the empire was truly claimed, all that noise…  Well.  Then wouldn’t the people remember?                

It wasn’t like Gamzee’d ever say no to something like that.  If he had shit his friends needed to motherfucking use, then wasn’t it just about as good as theirs?  His murdermirth, his creeping haze of chucklevoodoos.  His ship.  The oldest gospels preached that kinda philosophy, rapped out before Her Imperious Condescension was hatched, maybe even before trolls left Alternia at all.               

Gamzee would bring this team to Vriska and that newly modified Imperial ship Terezi’d told about, and then they would head off to the brink of their Empress’s mind, where the living world brushed staring void.  They’d do what needed to be fucking done, and Gamzee would play his own role as well as he could.He’d take care of the Condesce’s captured general, apparently.Take care of that smirking Imperial-clown in whichever way he chose.                

Turned out that was another side to his role, like what Terezi had warned him about. And now she said, “I _wanted_ to tell you the easiest roads, as far as that guy is concerned,” which wasn’t exactly an encouraging thing to hear. She shrugged over to Rose, who nodded, smiling softly, barely looking up from her computer.  What sort of tangled, messy secrets did the other Rose-es on her mysterious inter-universe server thingy even know?  Gamzee wondered about all that, but he knew Rose’s human expressions well enough to see it wouldn’t have done too much good to ask. 

Terezi breathed deep, studying him in that sharp, sightless way her unborn lusus had taught her.  She always tended towards a loud kinda voice, Terezi, but it was something creeping up on soft, now. “The making of the choice matters, this time.  It’ll tell us what version of you we’re dealing with: what new Mirthful Church is gonna grow under your care.You’re starting something, whatever you do.”

“Aw, no,” Gamzee said.He shook his head, almost without meaning to. Like an impulse, like wincing when all the pain hit after a swirl of murdermirth faded back. “Really?With just one choice?I’ll fuck it up, Terezi.What if I fuck it up?”           

“You might, but you might not. I’d focus on ‘might not,’” Dave said from somewhere a ways over Terezi’s shoulder. “Actually, I wouldn’t think about it too much, if possible?Eh. Terezi’s pulled this ‘your choice matters’ thing on me, too.”               

Terezi snickered on cue, there, but Gamzee thought maybe she was playing up her own diabolical scheming Seer thing.  ‘Cause they were talking about Dave’s bro, in the end.  Choices not yet made, that had to unfold organically as the solving of a riddle.  That was the shit with Dave’s bro right there, handed over in a fucking pie tin. It was fun in ritual, but sucked sometimes out in a motherfucker’s life. Everybody knew if a clown offered some unholy blasphemers a puzzle like that, saying maybe they’d pardon – maybe those capricious gods would be pitying and nobody needed to die – it never counted if the answers were already known.  Usually got culled messier, then, if you answered without blinking.  A rotten thing, said the Grand Highblood so long ago, not going along with the game.               

Someday, Dave would need to make his own choice…  For Dirk Strider’s sake and his own…  But it looked like Gamzee’s had snuck up on him sooner.  See, the captured general was a motherfucking clown priest.  One of those strutting around like they wanted to be some kinda new Grand Highblood in the Empress’s time of need, though it’d probably be divine treason to spell it out all clear as a knock-knock joke like that.  Nepeta and Equius had only just then brought him in, and he’d apparently had some really cruel puns to make on the way to that haven city.              

This guy’s act was all sharp tongue and dreamlike puppetry, and he’d lost too many ships to Eridan’s angels – ships full of the mirthful devout, swallowed by hope and light. Lost too many ships to play for fun anymore.  There were gaudy, splattering-acid glowsticks woven into his armor; there was lace up his sleeves, and silky ground bones mixed into his face paint.               

“We haven’t lost the oldest gospels just ‘cause they say so,” he pleaded, voice as innocent and dripping as a popsicle left out to melt.  As the popsicle swaying precariously in his hands while he paced, sometimes, maybe, and a fury so, so close to stirring up inside him.  “You know how we’ve been taught: the murder frenzy is our hatch-right – our blood is sacred, carbonated overflow from the veins of the twofold gods.  Maybe this Gamzee Makara’s forgotten, but I haven’t – we haven’t – have we?”              

He told winding, anecdotal jokes where the idea of revolution ever rewriting a world was the punchline; he had offered himself over in exchange for a handful of his gunned-down crew, dragged out of a ship left in curling tatters by Nepeta’s claws.  Gamzee could understand him, and he couldn’t.  Gamzee hated what he’d done – the haven cities he’d sent his clowns into like a holy plague, the talk of godly, entitled blood, the punishments for desertion.  But could he honestly know he would’ve turned out different, raised in those motherfucking lacy sleeves, buying all that expensive-ass paint?  Could his faith have grown twisted and mangling in just that selfsame way, if he’d never been that one lonely and sopor-stumbling self he’d always known?  If Karkat hadn’t believed in him; if he’d never learned to admire Tavros’s gentleness and all that good shit.  It was impossible to say.              

Some of Gamzee’s crew had started out so sure of the Condesce’s hateful order, just as Equius had been, but once that knowing dropped like carved-off meat then, well…  Well, people’d sometimes seen the church how Gamzee saw it, hadn’t they?  Seen a world bleeding as equals, too, and known how deeply that was at the core of so many mirthful waiting prophesies.  Not casting their faith down, truly, honestly, but raising the rest of Alternia up where they could’ve always been.  Where the gods would’ve carried them even through that other world’s game: through so many twists and turns, to the paradise planet and the Vast Honk its own self.               

Imprison or cull; convert or control?  This fancy scheming general motherfucker was in Gamzee’s claws, now, and he was heckling Equius through the sputtering transportation-forcefield of his cell when Gamzee got there.  His name was Cimyra Slapzo, and if he tried to take a step beyond his motherfucking cell he’d just wind up zapped back further into it again, possibly missing a couple of his still-twitching organs.               

Equius scooped up one of Gamzee’s hands and squeezed it, gritting his teeth so a couple of them splintered a little.  He said, “Gamzee.  I apologize for not joining you at Terezi’s planning session.  It is not as though I would avoid a chance to assess your progress – ”               

“It’s cool,” Gamzee said, swinging Equius into a very damp one-armed hug.  Half a playful shove, then, and the sort of kiss with just a little fang.  “You didn’t want to be there when I heard about this guy.”             

“No Subjugglator – or, ‘Mirthful Priest,’ excuse me – has insisted on me calling them ‘Highblood’ in some time,” said Equius.  His greasy, sweat-sharp lips curled up into sneering, the way they did watching some of Gamzee’s favorite movies.  “I’ve found it’s grown… Distasteful, when it isn’t you, and at my own request.”               

“Yeah, brother,” Gamzee said.  “I hope you didn’t fucking do it, right?”              

“He did though,” said Subjugglator General Slapzo from his cell.  His face paint was intentionally smeary-looking and changeable, with what looked like a shit ton of warped neon eyes painted down his cheeks.  He was giggling, now: very high-pitched and knowing.  That sort of giggle would serve him motherfucking well, if all the wannabe Grand Highbloods ever had some kinda rap battle or something.  “Your hatecrush groveled just like I asked, and if I didn’t know any better I’d think he actually enjoyed it!”               

Equius snorted, the uniform Feferi’d given him getting soaked at the collar, a dangerous oil in his voice when he spoke next.  “And what would it prove, if I did?”              

“That nothing’s really changing,” Slapzo said.  And then, “I mean… Obviously.”  He hopped up and did a bouncing sort of bow for Gamzee, all too-wide smiles and a wave of bloodstained finger puppets.  “And hello to you, Gamzee Makara!  You know, I preach about you all the time.  It would mean so much if you’d come back to us.  You know the drill, what I gotta say next: it’ll be a show to die for!Haha, right?It’s a bad joke: it’s the truth.”              

Gamzee thought for a second, and then sighed.This was the moment he made his first bleary steps towards choosing a path. Whatever he said next would matter more than he’d thought his slurred and wound-together words ever could.He wasn’t ready - maybe he never would’ve been truly ready, but he didn’t see what other fucking choice he had.

Gamzee asked, “Hey, brother, you wanna hear a joke?”               

“Always,” said Slapzo, though his tone of voice said he’d rather be the one telling punchlines.             

“What’s got a lot of eyes but won’t see what’s fucking real in our own motherfucking gospel, and is all to be riding around in the holding cell of my very own worship circus tomorrow night?”

“I dunno, what?” said Slapzo, all wide-eyed and scratching at one of his painted-on irises.  That was the rules of the joke, after all.He’d gotten paint on his lacy sleeves, all crusty and flaking. Paint and blood, just like Gamzee wore around sometimes. 

“You, man!” Gamzee chuckled. It wasn’t as hard to laugh on cue as he had thought it would be.The laughing bubbled out, always shaken-up and just waiting inside him.

And Slapzo said, “Oh, fuck you.  You’re not killing me?”       

“Yes,” said Equius.  “I had heard this was your choice to make...  And think what a simple, sudden blow it would be to the Empress’s forces if not even her ringmasters are sacred.I would advise you cull this one, Gamzee.” 

“How cute!He gives advice, too,” said Slapzo. “Just one crack of your clubs, brother.I’ve seen you fight. I know you’ll go for the back of my neck, and I know it’ll be so quick it’s almost like you don’t know what our blood -“             

Gamzee ignored all that.He thought back on what had made him tell the sing-song little joke he had in the first motherfucking place. Thought back on what Terezi’d told him he was doing, now: throwing together a new church history, scribbling doctrine that might linger.What sort of church did he want to sell his soul to?What sort of steps did he wanna take, whatever they turned out to be in the end? 

“Sorry,” Gamzee told his kismesis, though he only sort of meant it – he knew Equius hated how stubborn he could be.  “I got some other plans forming, now.  I think.”                

Whatever plans Gamzee had started out fuzzy and smudged as his first stick-figure paintings, back on his hive walls when he was just some wiggler waiting for his lusus to come home, but he knew his circus would help him give them shape.  Like working out a whole act around snapping out a cheerful bundle of fake flowers at all the wrong moments; like picking up the chorus of someone’s hymn-rap and keeping it going right where the fucking thing left off.  

Gamzee’s plan didn’t start with killing his own brother in faith, that was for motherfucking sure.  At least not until he'd gotten a chance to preach their other lives, from Alternia, yes, but something before that, too...  Not until he'd tried whatever else might stitch two halves of their warring church back together or something.  That was as far as Gamzee knew for certain as hymns, certain as blood, though he trusted he could put together a little more before it was too late. His circus had a long time to figure shit out together, didn’t they?  Could drop their friends off with Vriska and then head away again to work everything out.  He wasn’t alone, at that point. It was his choice - his motherfucking church - but it could never be his alone.               

In the meanwhile, Gamzee bowed back to Slapzo in his cage, and got something both funny and very rude snapped about his battered old sweatpants.  Gamzee’s bows weren’t nearly so fancy as a trained-up Imperial clown’s, and he could feel Equius critiquing his form with hungry eyes the whole Messiahs-damned time.                

They hung out for just a little while before Gamzee made his way back to slouching by Karkat’s side, then – he’d get a whole journey with Equius, but not a lot of time left with the moirail that all helped keep him as himself.  Instead of claimed by a worship circus ship just like the one Slapzo had all been ringmaster for; instead of dying bent over himself in his hive by that sprawling grey beach long ago, choking sopor pie and blood into his lap and only just barely smelling the ocean.               

Karkat and Gamzee didn’t talk about the Condesce’s mind much, and they only discussed Cimyra Slapzo enough to confirm Karkat thought he was a fucking asshole.  No, both of those things waited a little, waited until evening came again and all their real-world duties with it.  All those insecurities – like whether Gamzee’s mind might manifest actual clutching Lil Cals that knew him in the dream bubbles, or if Karkat thought he was fucking over his own Mirthful Church by making a comically awful choice and refusing the murder rage he’d been hatched for – would get messaged over later.  Murmured down into a computer screen, as Karkat offered staticky advice and maybe a shoosh or two from the other side.               

They watched one of Karkat’s movies like old times, though, and Gamzee got up to date on all the quadrant situations around his office at the Alternian Embassy.  That was good.  That was all Gamzee could’ve asked for, and he slept more soundly than he had in a long ass time.  He didn’t even dream, which was such a blessing the Messiahs must’ve been feeling bad about what all had to happen next.  Nothing to pluck apart and dissect for other-universe horrors and strangeness-es as he woke up.  Nothing but drifting sopor, and then Karkat still in the respite block when he pried himself awake.He was working on some complicated memos and order-giving - Gamzee heard about it, but that’s not to say he was any real help.Karkat made him feel like he was, though, and only got a little frustrated at his own self when he didn’t explain some motherfucker or another’s message just right.              

Gamzee and all his worship circus had to get out of there, then.  Leave the ghost-moon and it’s haven city behind for something colder.Karkat held him for a minute before he heaved one of Nepeta’s weapon trunks over his shoulder and climbed onboard.Might’ve looked funny to some of the haven city motherfuckers gathered around to see what the fuck was going on, this giant clown hunching down like he trusted that short yell-y Embassy worker to keep him standing. Except, you know, Karkat did, and he whispered that Gamzee had better message him updates all the damn time.If he had trouble thinking up insults to drawl back at Cimyra Slapzo, then, well, Karkat would be happy to help him string together some really nasty ones. Karkat hadn’t seemed to completely understand why Gamzee didn’t just cull the guy, either, but he said it didn’t have to be his fucking choice. Probably shouldn’t be, actually. 

All those strangers’ eyes followed them, as this new team gathered and climbed into the worship circus, with its engines that sounded like carnival music. With those funhouse-mirror hallways and spinning big top at its heart.Gamzee’s crew got them all situated in rooms dressed up like circus train cars, scenes from Alternia painted along their walls as if through rattling windows.(They’d cleared some of Nepeta’s room for a temporary shipping chart if she wanted, of course.) 

All those strangers whispered a little, maybe, and Gamzee was pretty sure a couple people snapped pictures. He waved all goofily, facepaint smooth and careful, smile wide and not sure what else to do. Were they really making some sort of point here?Terezi’d said so, so it must’ve been fucking true. 

Heceta told Gamzee later how it’d been hard to load the Subjugglator General into their holding cell - said he’d done something of a chucklevoodoo puppet show and nearly spun them into quiet so he could make a probably very murder-y escape.Dave coughed out baffled laughter, hearing that, which kinda sucked because he was eating something that wound up a little down his shirt, just then. “A puppet show?” he demanded. “Holy shit. I guess he could make this trip weirder that way. At least.” 

The worship circus ship spun out towards the base where Vriska was waiting for them, and at first things seemed simple enough.They set up a security detail to make sure the Subjugglator General didn’t wiggle away, somehow, and Equius satthrough a few different divine circus acts, looking baffled and very still in the crowd of screaming clowns.Got sort of into it, though, after one of Gamzee’s better routines, which a few of his crewmates kept poking him in the ribs and teasing about.

Really, Gamzee should’ve known even their unmade mistake of a universe wouldn’t let shit follow its smoothest course.  Not always, anyway. They’d been so mirthfully blessed, sure, but plans held together just like boats stitched out of cotton candy some of the motherfucking time.  

If he had known what choices would be made for him - if he had known what all Vriska’s motherfucking distress call would say when it came - there’s no way to tell how that might’ve changed things.Didn’t matter.What mattered was: 

They were nearly there by the time Vriska’s message came, and all their plans had no hope but to change fast. 


	4. If this is one of the better timelines, do we even wanna know how the other ones play out?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again~ Ahhh, I really hope this came out okay. Transitions, geez. :P Thank you very very much for reading, as always, and I hope you've had an amazing week!!
> 
> (I'm having dream bubbles work a little differently than they did in canon, here, I think... But I was imagining horrorterror rules as sort of arcane and flexible? Ahahaha, hopefully it works~)
> 
> Thank you, again!

Vriska Serket wasn’t the type for distress calls, generally.  She’d kept painstakingly vivid notes on all her wartime conquests like she was mapping out a FLARP-ing campaign, or keeping a flamboyant diary same as her ancestor so many motherfucking sweeps past.  A matter of pride, see?  Telling people what kinda impossible wonders she’d been up to, or letting ‘em find out watching some haven city news feed.  Call her up all shocked like, _“Serket, how are you not dead?”_ while she just cackled at the other end of the line.

Vriska hadn’t shown Gamzee any of that “Mindfang’s Diary” shit yet, but she insisted on reading the best parts to Terezi practically whenever she could get her listening long enough.  Terezi said Vriska could always tell when she was too distracted to really pay proper fucking attention, what with that cerulean blood-right of hers, despite all the unfriendly stars sprawling out between them. 

Vriska saving motherfuckers, dragging them back to Feferi’s space; Vriska sabotaging Imperial ships just the way she used to sabotage Eridan back in their gore-and-seafoam hatemance days.  The way Gamzee saw it, maybe Vriska’d been able to direct all her ambition out into the world in different ways, now that her lusus was back on Alternia and getting fed somehow other than through her own murderous will.  Vriska had seen ships and crewmates that idolized her blown to glinting holy stardust – she’d gotten her hand clung to by alien strangers begging her to please, please chase the Condesce’s soldiers away.  And sometimes she decided to be the hero of that particular story, instead of hissing _“Soooooooo weak!”_ with a knowing smirk and shaking that motherfucker off her claws, you know?   Maybe kicking them in the face with one of her sharp red boots, too, if she was feeling especially disgusted.  Like in the old days.

The helpfulness happened more and more often, now, from all Gamzee heard.  The cure and not the plague, though of course Vriska could be either or both if she fucking felt like it.

Maybe Vriska would’ve wanted Gamzee to say she’d sent like a _“warning call,”_ or a _“grudging demand for some kinda motherfucking backup, so she wasn’t the only one doing their Messiahs-damned job.”_   Or something.  Not a “distress call” at all.  It’d be more eloquent on Vriska’s poison-slick tongue, for sure, and possibly mixed in with some FLARP-ing references and Eridan-mockery inside jokes Gamzee wouldn’t understand.

Vriska _called_ , though, and that’s what counted.  She didn’t leave what was going down for a heroic story sometime later, ‘cause going out to meet her just then might get a motherfucker culled.  Might get the final mission of that motherfucking war sliced down in its tracks, smeared over the big top floor for clowns to slip in all comical-like, arms wheeling and honk-horns frantic and the whole worship circus audience chanting wild prayers.  The Vast Honk was that shuddering, inevitable fall, of course, and maybe the laughter could be whatever ended-world, changed-world, came after. 

There was only so much Vriska could do on her own, by that point.  Only so much she could hold together with bravado and a handful of glinting luck-of-the-draw battle dice.

The base where she’d been waiting for them had been swarmed by the Condesce’s forces, by enough of an army to challenge even one of Vriska’s proper fleets.  If she hadn’t been in hiding just the way she was asked; if she hadn’t known Terezi’s choice-path foretold they were secure.  The Mirthful Church went where their Empress sent them, after all, shaken up to frenzy.  The particular circus targeting Vriska just then was known for ripping ships to scrap metal with their bare and bleeding hands…  Leaving gaping holes in the base’s hull, holes like in Gamzee’s thinkpan or the Empress’s gospels.  Holes that sometimes swallowed them into unforgiving space just the same as their enemies, sacrificed for laughing gods and empire. 

(And they’d be mourned by their family in faith, too – don’t you know it, brother – just as soon as the murder-haze let them see, again, and feel all the bones that had shattered apart inside them.  Taste the blood in their mouths…  Gamzee knew he would’ve done just the same, if he’d been hatched in their skins.  Just the same, for his Messiahs and friends and rebel Heiress. 

It hurt, hearing about all that noise, even as these clowns called him blasphemous.)  

The base would be all fear and blood and echoey wheezing horn-honks down the corridors, and then the drones would come.  They were acidic cold and slipping through the carved-out wounds in the ship’s hull – like maggots into meat, right?   Didn’t need to breathe in space, those Imperial drones, and they’d harvest up strangers Vriska never would have expected herself to care about.  Gamzee knew the drill, just the same as anybody.  Just the same as Vriska did, as she’d rounded up the base’s people and made her plan. 

The Old Vriska could’ve just gotten the fuck out of there and blown the base to scrap metal and blood splatters behind her, all carbonated-sweet clown insides and whatever nasty tasting stuff kept drones going.  Problem solved.  Pat on the back…  This New Vriska thought she should save as many beating hearts as she fucking could, though – it wasn’t a question that _she_ could escape.   But she needed more ships, if they wanted her to evacuate anyone before the entire base splintered apart.  Never took long, under this ringmaster: they were all about the undoing.  She needed more motherfuckers with weapons that could cut down the mirthful and gone.

“ _How the fuck did the Empress even find this place?_” Vriska demanded over the comm, and Gamzee could taste far more rage in her voice than anything like fear.  “They got the ship you were coming for, almost right away – like they knew what it was.  It’s in fucking tatters, now.  _How could the Empress have known?_ ”

Gamzee was sitting with Equius and Nepeta when Vriska’s call came.  Nepeta had been braiding her moirail’s hair, binding it away from the sweaty, twitching muscles of his neck.  Her hands were quick as killing-strike paws; her voice was all chipper and sugared like tea.  She’d been going on about how cute it was watching Kanaya try to play meddling relationship counselor for Gamzee’s circus crew.  Apparently, she’d already gotten Heceta aiming for a sterner auspistice-approach for Jestif and the guy with light-up shoes and a rubber chicken slipped into his belt.  Mentored her, if you motherfucking will, with her teacher-voice on and a wagging finger that Rose had actually described in her novels a couple separate admiring times.  Heceta had thought it was kinda sweet, too, almost like her centipede lusus was chittering at her again.  She’d started mimicking Kanaya’s voice now and then, and if she kept it up Gamzee had no motherfucking doubt she’d be the smoothest clown in all his circus.

Nepeta had been planning to braid Gamzee’s hair next, but she didn’t get around to any of that.  They worked out what all Terezi expected them to make of this new choice-path, first…  Tavros swung his ship around somewhere out in space, for instance, full of beast-lodgings and soft-voiced caretakers motherfucking ready to help with evacuations.  Jade said she’d use that crackling teleportation technology of hers, zapping herself close enough to be any use.  To drag any innocents away from that place and hopefully into Tavros’s stables or whatever haven cities were closest.  Vriska said, sure, fine, great, whatever could steal another battle away from the fucking Empress – _and_ still get counted as a Scourge Sisters’ victory, ‘cause the whole base would’ve been good and culled if she hadn’t been there.  You’re welcome.

Vriska’d grown up, too, from the hurting girl who could sacrifice all her friends for a chance to prove her worth – the same way she did in some of Gamzee’s dreams, brother, when Terezi had her sister’s blood on her sleeves and a limp, dead look on her face that never really shook itself back awake.  But Vriska was still her own self, in the end, and she still wanted credit for being so heroically selfless, didn’t she?  Feeling fucking powerful even while relying on her friends a little – Gamzee felt like Vriska’s younger self might have wanted that, but never known how to put the pieces together.  Sort of like he hadn’t been able to ride his motherfucking one-wheel device until his legs stretched out a little, or something.

Nepeta was the one speaking over the comm from Gamzee’s ship – Nepeta and Dave, coordinating what all their friends needed them to do next.  Normally, Gamzee would’ve kept himself nice and quiet.  Given them space to work their magic, just as his crew cleared room for him to juggle his clubs as part of the motherfucking show.  But now, as he imagined what all might’ve _changed_ …  What might’ve come unexpected-like…  His insides felt a little like they did watching Karkat get smaller and smaller out the worship circus window.  A little like when he woke up after dreaming himself torn in two. 

“We tried all to shackle the Subjugglator General’s chucklevoodoos, but could his fear have tipped her off?  Tipped _them_ off?” Gamzee asked.  His claws were carving streaks of carbonated blood in his palms, clenched so tight – he was staring at Equius’s hair, glossy and half-braided down his back.  Waiting for the braided pieces to come apart, just like this worship circus attacking Vriska looked at the motherfucking world.  Ships, stars.  Bones, braids.  “Is this _my_ choice path, ‘cause I kept that motherfucker alive, carried him away with us?”

For a second it seemed as though no one’d heard him.  The comm was just a lot of laugh-screaming war from Vriska’s side – a lot of murmured plotting from Dave and Terezi, trying to sort through choice-paths quick as possible and send everyone hurtling off towards a less-shitty future.  This was an unlikely road, apparently…  This was the sort of choice-path Terezi hadn’t been counting on.  She’d thought maybe the Condesce _could_ send fleets after Gamzee’s worship circus, which they’d have to berserker murder clown their way through or run the fuck away from…  She’d thought maybe Her Imperious Condescension’s dream bubbles would spread faster, gulping down whatever worlds they passed and gathering strangers up into her mind.  There were plans for all that shit, and there was a plan for this, too...  Even if Terezi didn’t think Gamzee was gonna like it, and Vriska was probably gonna start carrying around one of Jade’s teleporter guns strapped to her back after this.  Probably gonna lose more people than she really wanted to lose, even if she _was_ looking at them a little like pieces on a game board.

But then it was Karkat’s voice, plucked away from his meetings and memos, grumbly and soft.  Gamzee could just imagine the way Karkat would squeeze his arm if he’d been anywhere nearby, frowning at him.  Studying his face as if waiting for rage to bubble up like soda fizz all over their hands.  Waiting to smooth that flurry back down into something they could work with, if he fucking needed to.  “Might be part of it,” Karkat said.  “But then, there are so many variables.  Maybe some drones wanted to stop for a fucking sandwich a couple nights ago, too – some dumb thing Terezi couldn’t account for that sent the whole universe of stupidly tangled choice-paths out of whack."

"I guess so..."  Gamzee started.

Karkat sighed.  "It doesn’t matter.  Tighten your security now, if you’re worried.  This is what you chose, and you’re gonna pull it off: I believe that.”

Gamzee didn’t know what to say, really.  This was his choice, sure, but who the fuck was he to be making choices for his friends, anyway?  For his faith, for his rambling circus ship?  Who the fuck even _was_ he to begin with, only just lately realizing himself chosen by his friends, chosen by his quadrants and chucklevoodoos?  Chosen, he had to believe, by his gods?

It was alright that Gamzee didn’t have any words, at first.  Terezi did, and she said, “This isn’t even the worst choice-path, GZ.  You chose a harder road to a united church – sure.  But just because it might’ve been easier to subjugglate the whole other side once Feferi wins her challenge doesn’t mean that’s the way I was hoping you’d go for.”  She paused, muttered something to Dave that Gamzee couldn’t exactly make out.  Something about the Dark Carnival spreading across Alternia, down some paths, and Gamzee as a ringmaster rebuilding some monstrous patchwork soul…  _Lil Cal_ , she said, and Gamzee was glad there were pieces there that slipped right by him.

And then, “You should see some of the other ways this could’ve gone!” said Terezi.  “We’re evacuating Vriska’s base, as much as we can.  It will come together the way it has to.  Just…  Carry the team in to bring back the Empress.  Okay?”

“Okay,” Gamzee said, nice and slow and deep in his chest.  Not a clown-voice, really, for putting on worship and a show.  It would’ve been no good, asking to get the fuck off that ship, now.  Would’ve been no good asking to wait it out with Karkat in that tiny haven city respite block, some other motherfucker running his circus.  Too late, see?  Too late to jump on whatever they’d been working out to do with Subjugglator General Cimyra Slapzo, too late to rush at Vriska’s base faster.  Too late.

But Gamzee had always known he would go where his people needed him, and the Messiahs must’ve seen this shit coming.  Part of Gamzee heard Terezi listing off some rapid-fire advice that Nepeta scribbled up her arms…  Part of Gamzee heard Karkat telling him how pale he was for him – promising pity and safety once the dreams to come passed by.  Gamzee murmured that he pitied Karkat, too, oh the gods knew he fucking did, but truth be told most of him was already imagining what it would be like to feel himself truly bent up in one of those cold winding meteor vents.  Flashing eyes reflected in the smeary metal; a puppet’s arms jerking tighter around his neck.  Part of him was reminding Karkat to eat actual meals and shit –  don't work himself down to the fucking bone, you know –  but of course too much of him was trying not to let the panic show on his face.  Bubble up into barked words and rage and a fear all the rest of his clowns would feel smoggy through the ship…  Fear that would make Cimyra Slapzo laugh, be motherfucking sure of _that_.  Laugh deep in the belly of that ship, where the circus music clamored on at its jauntiest and most, most drowning. 

Gamzee didn’t want to imagine something worse than hurtling into the Condesce’s dream bubbles, worship circus ship wheeling like a top, spinning off the table that was their motherfucking world…  Knowing he could've been part of the reason so many clowns had just up and died.  So many of Vriska’s innocent, too; so many, so many, and now he’d have to really make something of whatever falling-domino choices he made.  Maybe there was no path without pain.  Maybe there was no road that’d come easy.  But Gamzee prayed for the strength make the best he could of this one…  To live out his own dreaming, but keep tied safe to this world’s self as best he fucking could.  

Fuck, he didn’t want to imagine doing that shit, either.  Not yet, not ever, but it happened all the same.

The journey out to those dream bubbles went by surprisingly fast, but maybe that’s just ‘cause Gamzee wanted to stretch it out like gummy sopor slime, like taffy.  Nepeta transcribed Terezi’s pointers onto one of the worship circus’s walls just like her ancestor scrawled out the Sufferer’s doctrine in sweeps long dead…  People studied them and murmured confusion to each other, but Gamzee couldn’t look too long without getting a little dread-sick.  Rose deliberated, stirring rum and juice together in long strange alien glasses she’d brought with her, before adding some pointers of her own to the wall.  Stuff gathered from talking with the multiverse of Rose-es on her impossible server, probably.

Gamzee didn’t watch her at it long, of course – Kanaya came over to ask after what all was written there, and Rose flushed darker with her warm Karkat-ish blood.  She curled her lips up into a nervous, painted smile, eyes flicking over Kanaya’s sharp collarbone and smooth, cold neck.  She met Gamzee’s eyes for just a split-second, as if asking him for help…  But when he took a heavy, uncertain step over to the pair of them, she smoothed her hair down a little, shaking her head.  Huh. 

Gamzee thought, _“Well, what would somebody in one of Karkat’s romcoms do, here?”_  and he ended up grinning as knowingly as he could, spinning off like he had somewhere important to be.  Rose would go easy on him if he fucked that up, probably.  He fed her slimy tentacle-cat Fiduspawn for her when she was too busy, after all, and they shared a pile of inside jokes Dave described as, “Morbid as fuck,” or “Some Edgar Allan Poe shit,” whatever exactly _that_ was. 

Equius and a handful of Gamzee’s most chucklevoodoo-slick clowns worked to keep Cimyra Slapzo dreaming quiet in the hidden places of that ship, too.  Waiting his turn.  The Subjugglator General knew Gamzee’s circus was throwing together some kinda plan, something to fucking do with him, and seemed to think all that was pretty funny…   But _also_ enough to make him wanna twist some necks up like motherfucking springs.  The best plan Gamzee had so far was to maybe trade him back, trade him back to his brothers and sisters in exchange for a chance to preach.  Preach their past lives, both on Alternia and in the strangeness before.  It had felt like it could reach some of the faithful, maybe, but now –

Who the fuck new how that preaching might change, after seeing whatever the dream bubbles held swimming and shifting inside them?  Who knew how the bubbles themselves might change, with such a furious snickering mind being carried in alongside them all?

When Gamzee first woke up inside Her Imperious Condescension’s dream, he didn’t realize that’s what it was right away.  In fact, he didn’t realize he was _himself_ , either – he crossed a pair of long, fish-scaled legs as if they were his own, first, leaning back into a throne all twisted living coral and woven gold, all gems and shells and bone.  He felt his webbed fingers curl against the trident propped up by that throne, and stared down at the huddled seadweller lords collapsed at his feet.  He heard his voice, but it wasn’t his own, really; he made a fish pun he didn’t honestly get and chuckled low in his chest because, damn, wasn’t he just fucking hilarious? 

He could feel the twitching of gills he’d never worn, carved into his neck like someone’d tried to slash it up a few separate times but he’d never stopped breathing.  His skin wasn’t skin, but it _did_ catch the shifting watery torchlight almost like dusky mother-of-pearl.  He felt the trident swing, heavier in his hands than skull-crunching juggling clubs were ever gonna be, and he felt he knew the weight of it even if it was hard to think of his own name, just then.

_Meenah._

But wasn’t he Meenah Peixes, the Empress of so many drowned worlds? 

He was, he _was_ , for just that moment, and he felt the satisfying squelch of his trident through the seadwellers groveling against his boots.  They’d failed him.  It didn’t matter how – it didn’t matter why –

That wasn’t part of the dream –

Gamzee woke when he looked down at his claws, and saw they were greasy with clown paint.  Not the way they should’ve been.  They were ragged, sprouting from thick, soft fingers.  A stranger’s fingers, nearly, and his palms were bleeding a fizzy purple blood he knew couldn’t have been an Empress’s.  He puzzled down at those hands for a long, dark second, and then thrashed awake in his own recuperacoon.  Sputtering.  He was sure he’d swallowed a bit of sopor, dragging himself back to the surface; he was sure breathing wasn’t supposed to hurt so much as it did.  The worship circus ship’s rambling engine music flooded back as if from very far away, and he heard people stirring outside his door.  Calling to each other about the dreaming; trying to shake each other awake, again.

So that’s what it would be like, this time.  That’s the sort of dream Her Imperious Condescension had asked the horrorterrors to spin for her.  That was what it might be like, slipping in and out of someone else’s bones.

When Gamzee padded his way, dripping sopor and blood from his palms, out into the main ship…  By Nepeta’s instruction wall, brother, ‘cause that seemed like maybe the steadiest place just then…  He wasn’t fucking alone.  So many of his crew were staring out at the deep-sea throne room beyond their worship circus windows – at the Empress’s fancy chair itself, where they had only just then been leaning back all smug and ready to cull.  So many of his friends were whispering warnings about their secret selves, getting ready for whatever dream bubbles would come for them next.  Following Gamzee with their eyes, now and then, like the bottled-up fear soaking out of him tasted deadly and strange.

“The Condesce isn’t gonna be anywhere near here,” Nepeta said, slipping in next to Gamzee.  Her voice was growling and very, very soft.  She pointed up to Terezi’s instructions – some of those same words were still scribbled up her arm, Gamzee could tell, though they’d been scrubbed at enough to fade a little.  “We’re right at the edge of things, still.”

Gamzee scanned Terezi’s warnings and hastily belted-out advice; he watched Rose’s fancy script down at the bottom for a long time, as if expecting it to start wriggling or glitching out of being all horrorterror-like.  “Aw.  Yeah,” he said.  “That’s about what I fucking thought, sister.”   


	5. Is anyone ELSE starting to lose track of all these dreams?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHH, sorry I'm posting this so late in the day. It's still technically Sunday where I am, but.... Dang, way later than I wanted. Happy Mother's Day, though! I hope you've all had a great week. And... I also hope you enjoy the chapter? Sorry, as ever, for anything I messed up. :)
> 
> Thank you for reading!!
> 
> (Edit, Monday morning: some reason, this update wasn’t appearing at the beginning of the Homestuck story list... so it makes me wonder if everything went through properly? Submitting “post” again, to see if that helps???? Idk. :p anyway, have a nice day!)
> 
> (Edit, Tuesday morning: I was reading back through and found a couple typos!! I’ve fixed them. :) sorry!!!)

Her Imperious Condescension would be tucked away deep in the mess of everybody’s mind – the mess of _her_ mind, right?  It seemed like she knew they were coming into those dream bubbles, after all…  Knew Feferi’d sent a team in to drag her back to face the relentless shaky-heartbeat challenge music and all that.  Face the chessboard battleground one more time, its slick tile still shattered apart and sharp enough to slice the webs between a motherfucker’s toes.  That was sort of what Vriska’d said, when the ship they were supposed to use got trashed; sort of what Terezi’d known, when she asked them to go in anyway without even a stop to switch out thinkpans.  Keeping only the crew that’d work smoothest, you know, without Gamzee’s sopor-smeary self or the Imperial murder clown in their holding cell. 

Must’ve meant they could lose their shot, somehow.  Must’ve meant the goal line was changing, twisting away like Gamzee’s sea goat lusus in the deep.  Dave Strider had his theories about all that noise…  Fuck, nearly _everybody_ had their theories.  They talked all that shit through, and Dave monologued a little – he’d taken to monologuing his thoughts out often enough, what with hunting the Batterwitch’s forces across Earth all by his own self.  Usually it was in kinda a pacing mutter, with a lot of obscure Earth “irony” jokes tossed in and missing any clear-cut motherfucking punchlines.  Gamzee could just imagine him pacing like that across Earth hotel rooms and dripping Earth hideout caves, you know, or whatever, with maps spread out by his feet and fake IDs in his pockets.  They talked shit over and waded through the dreaming, until enough time passed that the claw-carvings in Gamzee’s palms scabbed over.  Itchy as anything, brother, and he’d reopened the fucking things a couple times all accidentally.  Spilled grape soda blood down his fingers and staining his clothes. 

Still, they healed.

And even so –

The Empress hadn’t fucking attacked, yet.  Maybe she didn’t think she needed to?  Gamzee couldn’t exactly blame her on that one, bro – it’d be easy for any crew to tire itself out, there, wandering from subconscious to subconscious.  Spiraling deeper, and puzzling over the notes Terezi had given them to decorate their wall Nepeta-style.  Cryptic as fuck, those notes.  Something about “healing the space;” something about “Beforus,” whatever the fuck that was.  Felt a little familiar, except Gamzee was sure he’d never known the word before.  A deep-in-the-bones familiar, though, like the oldest gospels he’d dreamt so real as life.  Nepeta said so, too, even if Equius was sure he couldn’t remember anything like that noise at all. 

The further they made it into the dream bubbles, the more Gamzee knew it’d be easy to tear each other apart, thinking they were fighting their way through someone else’s giggling rage in the middle of a long-rotten battlefield…  Knew it’d be easy to drift away, stuck in a moment that wasn’t even theirs to begin with.  Might just be a waste of motherfucking power, Her Imperious Condescension targeting them now, before they proved they could make it through to her hidden, waiting places.  There were so many times everybody forgot to fly the fucking ship, after all; there were so many times they nearly disabled their own worship circus thinking they were Rose turning off some human coffee machine.  Fishing pictures of Jade out of the trashcan and folding them up into her pocket with a “hmph”-ing little sigh.  

It was hard not to imagine the Condesce laughing at them, as they made their way.  Everybody had theories about that, too.  About how she was waiting for them to get culled somehow stupid, not even at her own hand.  She would probably use that practiced, chiming golden laugh, Gamzee thought – you know, her Imperial laugh, with only the coldest solitary kind of joy…  The one that usually echoed through Alternian space when another haven city got crushed into bits of shrapnel and ruined meat.  Like one of those gaudy banners Her Imperious Condescension flew everywhere – like one of her “I Won, So Suck It” victory music videos that even Sollux couldn’t get to stop hijacking husktops all throughout the divided empire. 

Normally, Gamzee _liked_ getting laughs.  Fucking prided himself on it – sort of the point to so much of what went down in every worship circus, wasn’t it, when divine rage wasn’t called for?  But thinking of the Empress laughing as his friends relived clutching, unwanted memories…   As Rose locked herself in her respite block again, hands shaking so much she accidentally poured her drink all over the floor…  As some of his clowns came to him begging, “Brother, forget my secrets, if you can,” or else had to get their bones crunched back together in the ship’s gore-crusty medicalizers ‘cause they’d gotten torn apart like trying to crack open Faygo bottles…  Fuck.  Probably the worst kind of laughter a clown could get. 

It was cruel, feeling lost in so many minds.  It was cruel, dreaming as Cimyra Slapzo and then waking up to hear the Subjugglator General laughing from his cell deep, deep in the ship’s guts.  Laughing like his own Condesce, maybe, and clapping like he’d just seen the best fucking performance ever – bent over himself, sometimes, even, if the dream had been especially wicked.  Crackly carbonated tears fucked with his painted-on eyes, now and then.  He asked his guards if they thought maybe they were heretics _now_ like he thought it was only a matter of time. 

It had been a dream about conquering a world, most recently; a dream about divine right, and splattering open those acid-glowsticks on Slapzo’s armor…  Letting them melt away some of the Alternian Empire’s enemies, turning howling skin into so much whimsy and stringy smoldering neon.  A dream for the blasphemous drowned, and what Gamzee could’ve become had the world been different – if Feferi hadn’t made her deals with eldritch lusus-gods, maybe.  Getting all swallowed up by it left Gamzee breathing deep – reminding himself what all Karkat would tell him about his fizzing blood, about his head.  He wound up crouching away from everyone for a little while, thinking shit like, _“Maybe he’d say: ‘You can trust yourself.  I’ve got you.  You haven’t hurt anyone – just breathe.  No, not like that.  You know what I mean.  Breathe deep – I’m afraid you’re going to choke or something, Gamzee.  Wow.’  Yeah...  Ahaha.  Uh.  It’d go something like that, right?”_

Honestly, Gamzee just wanted to know Karkat would get all his piled-up video messages, someday.  He’d been recording a fuck ton of them – the notification buzzes would go on for minutes, it felt like, and maybe Karkat would level him with a resigned sort of glower as they listened together…  A smile teasing at the edge of his lip, bitten down just barely by those cute little stubborn fangs.  “Well look at that,” he’d say.  “I mean, I knew you’d miss me, but did you record whole fucking _albums_ or something?  This isn’t like the time you tried to turn an exquisite piece of cinema into a clown-rap musical, is it?”

Fuck, yeah.  It was simple, in the end:

They all just needed to get home.  Again.  They all just needed to get home, for what Gamzee hoped would be the last time for a long motherfucking while. 

Equius really had his work cut out for him trying to keep the whole thing steady and pushing on.  Maybe it was the Void in him – the Void he’d inherited from their other world – but sometimes dreams just dripped over him like sweat down his back.  Like oil.  That was another thing that happened, the further in they got: Equius got steadier and steadier, frowning out at the dreamers with a sharp furrow between his eyebrows.  He said it looked to _him_ like they were flying through emptiness, sometimes.  Through a thick and syrupy darkness, holding them in tight.  Glossy and shifting around the edges, maybe…  A bauble strung just on the edge of horrorterror space, but nothing more.      

Sometimes Gamzee’s worship circus ship would slip through huge frozen worlds of mind – a night in Kanaya’s old hive, maybe, stretched out impossibly long and full of feelings Gamzee knew he wasn’t supposed to grab at.  _They_ grabbed at _him_ , though, brother – he’d look at an unfinished gown project (that wasn’t really there – that was somewhere outside their ship’s window, draped over a chair…  But not really there, either, if Equius’s Void was the truth of things) and think, _“Ah, I should finish that,”_ in a voice that wasn’t much like his own motherfucking self at all.  Kanaya’s voice, and everyone on the ship might’ve been dreaming that, too.  He’d hear the pounding of feet down the hallway outside, motherfuckers rushing off somewhere, and he’d just sort of _know_ his mothlike Mother Grub lusus must’ve been beating up her wings into a sandstorm or something, tiny flecks of mica and shit all catching in Alternia’s too-bright sun…  You know. 

It would be one dream, and then another fucking dream.  Gamzee would be sparring with Equius one second, burning off steam, throwing himself into too-strong arms until Nepeta whacked on the wall of the respite block and asked them to _please_ order each other around a little quieter, maybe…  (Not like she didn’t ship it, but seriously, guys!) …  And then the ship would ease into another dream bubble and he’d be tearing a young Heiress’s cold squirming heart out.  Feeling it squeeze to pulp in his claws.  Thinking, _“Bye, now, little brat,”_ and then, in his own voice, _“Fuck, she didn’t look like Feferi, did she?”_

Gamzee’d be Jestif in the merry, rattling carnival swamps where they grew up, trying to fish their broken matesprit out of the mud (gotta prop the fucking pieces back together, at least one last time.  Like their mask, over and over and –)

He’d be Rose, swallowing horrorterror voices down like liquor stirred into coffee, licking burning eerie magic off the edges of her lips as she tried to interview for literary magazines –

He’d be Dave, climbing the rust-flaking stairs of his hive stem back in Earth Texas, trying to convince his hands to stop shaking.  Getting himself ready to face his brother up on the fucking roof for a showdown.  Wondering whether he’d eat that night.

(And Lil Cal would be there in a dream like that, sure as Dave’s own clockwork Gamzee didn’t try and understand.  It always looked like that puppet knew Gamzee, too – knew him deep inside.  ‘Cause he _did_ , right?  Knew Gamzee better than he could really know his own fucking self, and the laughter in those glossy puppet eyes woke him up every damn time.)

They hadn’t dreamed any of Gamzee’s darkest memories, not yet.  Every time the dream bubbles shifted, he braced himself.  It’d be now, he thought – _now_ , the dull rot-stink of that refrigerator prison would come for him, or he’d wake up bent inside one of those motherfucking meteor vents.  Belonging there, no matter how hard he’d tried to convince himself that chosen, stranger’s universe had to be a heretical lie.

 _“Okay – is this where that other life gets me?” _he’d think, feeling the sick squirming deep in him and trying to remember Karkat’s voice.

But no.

Not yet. 

Actually, none of the dream bubbles held Gamzee’s other-universe life inside them, not for a long time.  Nepeta curled up on Equius’s lap for a while after dreaming a whole night on Gamzee’s old grey beach, though, waiting for someone to message – anyone at all – or for the sinuous curve of a sea-goat’s back to wind its way out of the dark cold water.  She tucked her head in her arms, and Equius traced his cracked fingertips down the curve of her spine, and Gamzee got himself pulled over into the hug by a set of artificial claws like polished-up razorblades when he tried walking by.  That’s all anyone dreamt of Gamzee’s mind, at first, except that they dreamed about it a few separate fucking times.  Whenever that dream bubble came around, it felt like all the progress they’d made had been like an elaborate, lovingly-sculpted sand castle: possibly imagined up through a sticky sopor haze…  And even if it wasn’t, that shit was never meant to last.  The dream felt sort of horribly _right_ , like one of his huge feet slipping into a perfectly sized giant clown shoe.

Of course.  Of course Gamzee was back there, right?  Of course his eyes would be half-lidded and slipping.  Of course he’d never make friends with an alien, or probably fill any quadrants before he was booted off to the Empress’s stars.

Gamzee let himself get hugged by Nepeta, when she dragged him close – even if her claws _did_ rip into the soft of his side just a little bit.  He closed his eyes, and felt Equius squirming between his kismesis and moirail, just a little, and huffing down all fond and sad against his neck.  It was a relief waking up from every dream, in a way, but it was strange clawing his way from the past into a galaxy-wide war and being so motherfucking glad about it.   Equius held Gamzee’s shirt hard enough to rip it – which he declared was okay, because Gamzee needed better clothes anyway, or something – and _he_ hadn’t even dreamed anything at all.  Made a brother feel wanted, then, didn’t it, whatever else was happening in their timeline.

Actually…  _Plenty_ of shit happened before they got to Gamzee’s other-world life, and by that point things were already changing.  They were already deep, deep into the dreaming, and the Condesce was starting to wonder if they’d stumble down into her secrets sometime soon.  Starting to stir, like her and Feferi’s monstrous lusus, spreading out those tangled tentacles of hers beneath the world.

Just before Gamzee’s darker self got all dreamed about, two things happened that would linger with him for a long fucking time afterwards.  The first thing involved Rose and Kanaya, and the second was a dream bubble that didn’t feel like it could belong to anybody real at all.  Didn’t belong to Alternia.   

Here’s how it started –

Not with a dream so much as with a lost short story.

It was _Rose’s_ story, you know?  Something she’d been scribbling in a stiff and bloodless human notebook while she waited for all the other-universe Rose-es to reply on her arcane server.  (How she hadn’t lost access to that thing was anyone’s guess – Seer magic?  Gamzee chalked a lot of shit up to “Seer magic” and felt pretty okay with it, to be real with you.)

Rose knocked on the door to Gamzee’s respite block really late one day looking for that notebook – it was nearly evening, when most of the hallway lights were still spinning in their quietest circus-colors.  Dim swimmy purples and greens, and nothing Equius would call “Garish,” yet.  Her sleeves were long and lacy, like some kinda nightgown wizard-robes, and Gamzee completely got why she’d want to write out a little fantasy world to unwind and sort her thoughts.  Something in her own control, brother, and not so merciless as the dream bubbles crouched and waiting to gulp her down.  It was like when Gamzee went to work on a tumbling routine all by himself, every now and then.  It was like when he hummed his own bouncing showtime music, and swung his juggling clubs where not a single soul could see.

Rose said she’d been trying something different, this time – something embarrassing.  Like what her mother would have written, she felt, though that wasn’t the embarrassing part.  It was a wizard story, sure, but it was supposed to be funny and warm, and…  You know.  Maybe sort of a tribute?  Maybe sort of trying to connect, despite everything?

It wasn’t the sort of thing Rose was ready for people to see, anyway, and Gamzee helped her hunt all over the ship for it.  She might’ve asked Dave, except that he was guarding Cimyra Slapzo just then – keeping the guy’s chucklevoodoos frozen in time, the way Aradia had taught him to do.  Practicing the skill, really, ‘cause he seemed to know “time-freezing” might come into play later…  And anyway, _Dave_ would probably have had so much fun teasing her it’d sort of defy the point.  Gamzee was a sleepy, oblivious sort of comfort when he wanted to be, Rose told him – teeth gritted, voice smooth – and Gamzee said well, fuck.  That was just about one of the nicest things anyone could fucking think about him.

They found the notebook with Heceta – who’d scooped it up from underneath one of the helm chairs, earlier, and couldn’t actually read twirly human writing even if she decided it was sort of beautiful.   But here’s where Gamzee thought maybe the gods’ own kinder fate came into play: a miracle, the way he’d always believed could up and fucking make itself true.  Heceta’d taken the book to Kanaya, her auspistice-mentor, see.   They were sitting tucked together neatly in the ship’s own vendor-booth dining hall, between an automated stand stuffed with all sorts of cotton candy flavors (blood-splattered sugar, sea salt and beetle, sticky human caramel…  You know, normal shit) and the microwave Dave had insisted on bringing along. 

Kanaya was unsure if she should read the thing, really – Gamzee heard her murmuring, “Rose’s handwriting is so intricate, isn’t it?  So many unnecessary twists and turns.  I…  It’s like embroidering fabric, even if you wouldn’t have to.  Even if the dress would sell, anyway…”

“I can see that,” Heceta was saying.  “The letters look curly, like tiny worms?  I dunno.”

“Very elegant worms,” said Kanaya, and Heceta snickered at her fondly.  Shrugged.

“The whole book is seeping fear, though – and horrorterror-stains,” Heceta offered.  She didn’t add, _“Sort of like you are oozing romantic nervousness, my dear,” _but Gamzee thought he could see the words getting written out and then crumpled up in her mind.  “I felt it from practically the other end of the room…  Thought I should let somebody know.”

“That’s probably just because I held it,” Rose said – her voice was dark and deep in her throat, then.  Velvety and strange in a way Gamzee suspected would make Kanaya shiver.  “But it’s nothing to worry about, I can promise that.”

Rose held out her hand for the notebook back, keeping her spine very straight and her eyes focused on Kanaya’s wrist instead of whatever sort of expression she had going on with her face.  And in just that split second, Kanaya Maryam misunderstood.  She passed Rose her own hand, slim and moth-fluttery and not quite warm enough to be human.  Like Rose was gonna help her up, or something; like this was some sort of strange human greeting, and Kanaya was more than ready to see what was up.  She realized her mistake almost right away – must’ve been Rose’s snorted half-laugh or surprise, or Heceta cackling, “Oooo!” a couple feet away – and flushed deep jade.  She tugged her hand back, apologizing as silky and formal as she could fucking get.

It was too late, though.  Rose had laughed in front of Kanaya for what Gamzee thought was the first time, and Rose was probably thinking back over the way this dream girl of hers had kept trying to talk to her since they started their trip.  Reassessing her choices; remembering the Kanaya in her novels, dreamt up so motherfucking tenderly.  Scolding herself a little, probably, and chewing on her lip so she’d get dark sour paint on her teeth. 

Studying Rose’s expression a little, Gamzee thought maybe she felt kind of silly, too, but wasn’t as pissed off about it as she might’ve been.  Maybe he expected her to make a soft, awkward goodbye and lead him back out into the worship circus ship – he was all ready to head out whenever she wanted, brother, you know? – but then…  Rose didn’t leave the dining hall for a good long while.  She would tell Gamzee later that feeling the _realness_ of Kanaya’s hand had reminded her why she’d ached to get to know her in the first place – not for her own ego, or this idealized version of herself left over from another life, but for Kanaya’s own self.  Something like that.  Gamzee’d forget the way Rose said it soon enough, but he would remember the earnest burning in her eyes.  She’d written about Kanaya for so many years, not even realizing she was an actual person, blood and meat and insecurities just the same way she was.   Whether they ended up together or not…  Whether the timing was ideal or not…  If this woman Rose had always wanted to know took her hand so eagerly, who the fuck was gonna say no?

Rose ended up scooting over onto one of the dining hall stools, and talking with Kanaya and Heceta for a while.  Gamzee slumped over with them, half-asleep and thinking about miracles.  He thought about people coming together, mostly, and watched as Rose’s smile loosened slowly until she was able to flash those smoky eyes of hers at Kanaya all coy and shit.  It was good, he thought, that the Mirthful Messiahs could bless them with a situation all like that before any of his darkest dreams wrapped tight around them.  Before the Empress _did_ get it in her thinkpan to attack, or anything.

Eventually, Rose studied Kanaya’s face – both so like she’d always imagined it, and so different, too, with tiny scars Rose hadn’t remembered…  With a film of makeup powder smudging off where she’d brushed her cheek…  And asked, “Would you…  Hm.  Would you _like_ to know what’s in this notebook?  I can explain a little.  If you want.”

Gamzee thought that tasted like trust.  Heceta must’ve thought so, too, because she was all, “Hey, Gamzee – looks like you’re about to start sleep-drooling on the table or something.  Let’s get outta here, okay?” and they left the dining hall together.  

And here’s the other thing.  The stranger thing.

The dream about a world before Alternia – so long dead it wasn’t even getting lived out in some kinda “true world” timeline right then, or anything – and a self Gamzee’d never known how to fucking name, before. 


	6. So, I’m just not gonna worry too much about how I can remember this polished, kind-cruel universe, okay?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahahaha, I'm a little shy about this chapter, though I've been imagining it for a long time... Sorry for all my goofy Beforus headcanons. :P It's working towards the reinvention of the Mirthful Church, and based off my feelings about stuff from canon? Like... Gamzee foretelling miracles and stuff, and encouraging Tavros and Karkat to participate in his religion with him... And nobody being especially scared of Kurloz's cult. :D It's definitely just meant to be fun, and serve as a potential version of Beforus.... I really do hope you enjoy the chapter~ Thank you so so so much for reading!!!

Sometimes, Gamzee had to remind himself that every motherfucker would be up to some kinda different thing when their ship prowled from one dream bubble to another.  What felt like a switch from eating marshmallow-y human cereal to wading his way out of some monster’s insides as Nepeta – (with his claws dripping ribbons of gore and his hair tucked up in cute pigtails, you get it) – probably felt way different to somebody else.  No use assigning symbolism to that shit.  Just _happened_ , not so special for anybody.

Cimyra Slapzo fell into every dream while sulking in the bowels of the ship, for instance…  Sometimes drawling anecdotes to mess with Dave Strider, sometimes trying to get Kanaya to bow to him, which she hadn’t fucking done yet.  But every dream meant a trip out of that holding cell and back again, to him.  Nothing more than that.  And speaking of Kanaya, sister once fell into dreaming while patching up one of Heceta’s costumes – accidentally stitched her hand to the fucking gauze-skirt, that time.  Shit.  Not so much symbolism there as a lot of gifted apology-bandages with knock-knock jokes on them. 

Point being, Gamzee knew his own understanding of the dreams got framed by his “real world” memories stuffed in all around them.  Chaotically, haphazardly, and usually for no good motherfucking reason at all.  But when the next dream came for them – the dream about that fucking world sprawling out so impossible and taunting before their own Alternia – it lined up all especially eerie.  As if it had come just for him, somehow.  As if the dream bubbles _knew_ , and reached out when Gamzee Makara’s bones were lined up just right.

Impossible, huh?  Unless the Mirthful Messiahs had stepped in with another miracle – expecting revelation and laughing terror and all the loss Gamzee _did_ feel at the end of things – it was probably just the universe playing some ambiguous joke.    But then, those messiahs…  You never fucking knew for sure, did you?

The change would’ve been different for everybody, but for Gamzee it happened around when he’d slumped back to his respite block after helping Rose find her missing wizard story notebook.  He scratched at his neck so hardened sleeping sopor drifted down like rust off the Striders’ human apartment building; he yawned, tasting sourness all down his throat.  Let himself in and figured, hey, maybe he shouldn’t sleep after all.  Wasn’t too long before his shift would start, now.  Gotta go stand in front of Cimyra Slapzo’s cell, ignoring his snickering threats and terrible long, winding murder-jokes…  Gotta do his pan-rotted best to mute those fucking trained-up Imperial chucklevoodoos of his.  That whole thing.  Didn’t really have a lot more time left for sleep, and maybe he’d just end up feeling even more tired if he gave that shit a try.  Maybe he’d oversleep and leave Dave getting grumpier and grumpier, pacing in front of the holding cell downstairs. 

But in the meantime, Gamzee decided he’d record another message for Karkat.  Tell him about searching for Rose’s book…  Tell him about how Rose said he was “comforting,” and how that’d made him feel almost warm as mutant blood inside.  Ask questions Karkat wouldn’t get to answer until way fucking later, when he’d swat at Gamzee’s arm and go, “You asked me how my day was about fifty times, you know?  I guess I can give you fifty different answers, but at what horrible, incredibly boring cost?” 

When he switched on his husktop and clicked Karkat’s name, though…  When he leaned back and waited for the program to get itself all loaded up and ready…  You know it wasn’t Gamzee’s own fucking husktop anymore.  And the face that swam to view in the middle of it was Karkat’s, sure, but Gamzee’s actual moirail shouldn’t have been able to answer.

This wasn’t “Karkat” the way they knew him at all, really.  He had gold painted around his eyes like some kinda seadweller hotshot, and red crystals binding his neck like drops of unashamed, taunting blood.  He had a guarded smile on, and a uniform Gamzee didn’t recognize.  Lots of weird, unaggressive medals.  Not a single golden-fuchsia stripe that meant “planet flooded for the glory of the empire” or any shit like that.

See?  Gamzee clicked the button to pull up Karkat’s video chat thing in his actual life, and the dreaming Gamzee’s claws moved in just the same fucking way.  The chair creaked as he leaned back in it, just the fucking same; his eyes were still half-lidded and sleepy, his feet were still bare under the table…  How could the dream have timed itself any fucking better?

Honestly, that made it almost more disorienting, by this point.  Gamzee was so used to slipping into skins that felt wrong, poses that felt different, clothes he wouldn’t have known how to wear.  But now…  But now, it might’ve been his own damn self, just acting out a new sort of role.  Would’ve happened differently for everybody, though.  Wouldn’t have clicked together so real and true, like puzzle pieces some Subjugglator had wired up to a bomb.  Gotta solve the puzzle motherfucking fast as spurting blood, or you’d get carved into your own kind of puzzle, you know?  Too gloppy and steaming for any motherfucker to put your meat back together.

Gamzee thought about blinking, and clearing his throat.  His other self did those things, too, and they felt so, so real.  Both part of the dreaming and part of his own fucking life.  Wasn’t supposed to come together that way, brother. 

Karkat/Not-Karkat said, “Oh hey, I wasn’t expecting you to check in until the end of the week.  Have you gotten everyone indoctrinated into the church early, then?”

“What do you mean?” Gamzee asked, and it was sort of like his own voice – but also not him at all.  It was smoother, maybe meant for singing.  No sopor-rot there; not a stumble, not a slur.  He hated it.  He loved it and he hated it all in one – maybe because he knew Equius would feel that way, you know?  Would get a little weak in his strong, strong knees hearing Gamzee speak some proper Alternian, but would want his own pan-smeary clown back all the same.  It was a little amazing how completely Gamzee had come to believe in that, after their recent war-torn sweeps together.  It was a little amazing he could think of Equius, too, hearing his own voice polished up and healthy.  A stranger’s.   

“Should I send another round of runaway cullees, Bard?  You said your church is ‘all about the equality,’ didn’t you?  Or…  Or are you changing the terms of our agreement?”

“Aw, no –” Gamzee said, but Karkat cut him off.  Still had a lot of that bundled-up anger, didn’t he?  Just a little changed.  Raging against something new.  Gamzee knew without knowing that if he dug deeper into these borrowed memories, he’d see more about why.  This other version of him probably had answers about Karkat’s hurt, Karkat’s history – except that hunting out something like _that_ would’ve felt like digging through a motherfucker’s underwear drawer, or combing through their unnamed husktop files looking for secrets.  Gamzee backed off.  Just listened.  That’s what his own Karkat would’ve wanted him to do, anyway.        

“They warned me you were like this – changeable,” Karkat said, and the frustration in his voice hurt, a little. 

Gamzee felt himself decide not to let it show; he was surprised how completely his laughter here sounded like his own.  Deep in his chest, as he folded some claws up to cover his smile.  The room all around him had become striped and swirling like a sweet rainbow hard candy; it was full of piled-up crystalline juggling clubs and a lot more half-finished hymn-raps than actual motherfucking gore. There were only a handful of special stardust vials, and none of them looked too recently harvested.  The ceiling was painted in shivery silver and ink, mirthful gospels drawn out in a twirlier version of his own handwriting, illustrated as carefully as Gamzee thought he probably knew how to and shifting like erratic, senseless gears.  Gears grinding away without a battle robot or death machine to power…  Like the dizzy spinning of unconquered stars.  

That ceiling reminded Gamzee of the Jestprophet’s Show back on Alternia, honestly – those whimsical clown automatons acting out futures even while they creaked and tried to make the gathered faithful laugh.  The minute he pictured that sacred performance, though, with all its wonder, with all its hopeful truth…  The minute he remembered Karkat taking him there, and cheerful calliope music winding away so loud it shook in the dirt, and all the laughing worshipers passing Faygo bottles back and forth and all at peace together, you know…  He realized, yeah.  Yeah, that’s _exactly_ what it was like. 

And more than that: the Jestprophet’s Show was acting itself out somewhere in the building right fucking then, he knew that completely.  Equius had helped him build it – or this version of it, anyway – and so far as he knew that shit wasn’t even finished yet.  He didn’t build it thinking the thing could get itself remembered and turn up in another lifetime, you know?  He just knew his kismesis was trying to shove him towards his potential…  Trying to help him work for an elegant gibbering new breed of prophesy.

It fit together in Gamzee’s thinkpan like a sopor fog clearing.  (It definitely explained why there were so many horses involved in the Jestprophet's Show, anyway.)  Gamzee marveled at the knowing for just a second, and then scolded himself to pay attention.  To listen to the dream, and let it wash over him like so many trips into Dave’s ironic elementary school spelling bees and Nepeta’s attempts at matchmaking wilderness-y trolls around her hive.  He heard his other self say, “Send them along if you want to – we’ll shelter whoever you’ve got…  But would it really be _that_ bad if I just called to say hello?”

There it was – the stirring of a pale crush, even here.  Even as Karkat assessed him, bright mutant eyes sharp and so much more motherfucking confident than Gamzee’d ever seen them.  Gamzee felt himself pull on a too-honest, dripping warm grin – he felt himself nod like, _“Yeah, yeah it’s exactly what you think it is!”_ –  and the flush spread across Karkat’s cheeks and up his ears like somebody’d spilled Red Pop all over the fucking table.  He offered over the nervous hint of a smile right back...  Questioning.  Hoping.  Gamzee knew Karkat well enough to see when he was _hoping_ for something, and probably not just that Gamzee’s church would offer more “runaway cullees” some sanctuary.  The smile got snuffed out right quick, though.

Gamzee was the Jestprophet Bard, just then – he had a bunch of priestly titles bundled up inside him, stuffed in his pockets like old candy wrappers.  He’d never heard the word “Alternia,” not outside of his own rambling cryptic prophesy.  And that was alright: this was his Mirthful Church, and since when had Her Imperious Condescension’s clowns offered refuge to someone trying to escape getting themselves all motherfucking culled?  They just weren’t Her Imperious Condescension’s clowns, were they?  They’d never been sold to any sort of Empress at all, brother: they were devoted to gods and family in faith, gods and the Vast Honk to come.  Both “culling” _and_ the Mirthful Church had to mean something different, here.

Gamzee’d been “culled” his own self, and sometimes it wasn’t so bad.  Meant he got off the sopor early; meant he learned to read before he nearly drowned paddling after a lusus that just didn’t wanna come home.  But other times “culling” meant coddling, and stripping away voice and choices…  Meant that hidden-away knowing of what all had happened to Karkat that Gamzee didn’t feel right tearing open like one of Kanaya’s sewn-up finger Band-Aids.  Even though no one had to die, Gamzee’s Mirthful Church still wanted to level the playing field some.  That much he knew, too, sure as he knew his clown paint would be pretty much the fucking same, here.  He remembered painting it on that evening, after all.  Painting it on just the same way in two separate universes like two tangled-up, impossibly juggled moons.

Beforus.

This was “Beforus,” a whole world sacrificed to that game their own broken universe would never play, and as Gamzee realized it he was sure the rest of his worship circus ship would feel that shit, too.  Feel it just like the flutter of embarrassment in his chest as he did his best to hit on Beforus-Karkat.  He knew he’d moan about how badly all that went to Equius soon enough, and Equius would sigh, running fingers through that dark oily river of his hair.  Say something like, “Surely it wasn’t so terrible as all that.  Or…  _Was_ it?”

Eventually Karkat asked, “Should I expect calls like this in the future, then?  When you just get bored of writing your Mirthful Messiahs some new songs, or…  Something?” and Gamzee’s stomach dropped out of him.

“Not _bored_ , brother,” Gamzee felt himself say, “But, you know…  It’s more than likely, wouldn’t you think?”  And then he wrapped up the conversation really fucking quick.  What an awful, cryptic answer.  Ugh.  He muttered, “Mm.  Stupid, Makara.  Give him better answers, next time,” into the now-blank screen.

Gamzee stood.  Stretched, and pulled back on a pair of squeaky clown shoes – they were splattery rainbow polka-dots, and he somehow _knew_ they’d never gone strolling through a conquered world sloppy with alien blood.  Knew they’d never crunched a motherfucker’s skull beneath their heel without a damn good reason.

 It didn’t occur to Gamzee until later how motherfucking long the dream lasted – he was too busy climbing up a shit ton of winding Beforus-ean (Beforuse-ite?) worship circus stairs.  Past clowns prepping for their acts, smearing on laughing paint or twisting hundreds of balloons into a rambling multicolor tribute to divinity; past the workshop where he and Equius had been piecing together robotic prophesy, hoping to make something that would last.  (And that _had_ lasted, brother, longer than they could’ve ever known.)

 Past trolls hatched just sick or fragile or lowblood enough that too many of their decisions had been made for them their whole fucking lives.  Whether they wanted all that culling or not, which obviously they fucking hadn’t or they wouldn’t have come to stay with his church.  Some of those motherfuckers were decorating brand-new respite blocks and asking questions like, “So…  If I don’t want to stay in the worship circus, I can just _leave_?  Really?” 

They _could_ leave, Gamzee knew that, just like he knew he wouldn’t smash in their tender little skulls if they refused to kneel before the divine inevitability of the Vast Honk to end all things.  Wouldn’t even have thought like that shit.  It was alright, man.  It was all working itself out in small, miraculous ways, and he felt sure the universe would come together just how it needed to if only he gave it enough fucking time.  Trolls who wanted to work towards something outside of the hemospectrum made up a huge part of this Mirthful Church, honestly – it had been surprising at first, watching the dreaming, finding clowns that didn’t have bubbling purple blood looking so at home in the worship circus.  The _warmth_ there reminded Gamzee of the first time Karkat had decided to hold him, though.  Reminded him of when he used to ask his friends to join the faithful, whatever color they bled.   

Gamzee had sort of known there was a time before so many of the mirthful were bound by blood-caste.  Before the Grand Highblood had made his deals, and sold both his blood and their church away.  He had known, impossibly known, though he wouldn’t have been able to reach out and touch that truth until right fucking then.

_Bleeding as equals.”_

Gamzee thought about a paradise planet, _“bleeding as equals,”_ again, and again, and again walking through that Beforus worship circus.  Like the visions he’d sent those Batterwitch-guards when he first carved deep into his holy chucklevoodoos back on Earth; like the prize they might’ve won, after beating the fucking game that stole their truest universe.   It took him a minute to realize those were his own thoughts, sure, but _also_ the Bard’s thoughts.  Something they’d both been dreaming about bringing to life, even back before a dream like that flew in the face of what all clowns got ordered to pour their murdermirth into. 

The Mirthful Messiahs and their promised paradise to come had existed before drowned planets and big tops sticky with unfunny blasphemers’ insides – before private gospel shows for Her Imperious Condescension, where she was pretty much on her palmhusk the whole time and couldn’t tell one messiah from the other by the fucking end.  Of course they had.  Of course they fucking had.

It was reassuring, being in a thinkpan like the Bard’s – letting himself drift away in so much faith, all his doubts and hurt dissolving like cotton candy on your tongue.   Gamzee climbed the stairs with his other self.  All the way to a shuttle, painted up like a brain-teaser puzzle – sometimes one design and sometimes another, depending on what set of eyes got to looking on it – and all the way to the Heiress’s lessons after that.

Gamzee knew the Empress – (Feferi, wasn’t she, Feferi ruling a universe she hadn’t wanted to make their own broken universe into…  A universe she’d wanted to move beyond from, just like Alternia) – had asked him to give her rough, bitter little princess classes on dream interpretation and the reading of prophesy in handfuls of playing cards.  Messages and miracles in the tumbling crash of juggling clubs out of the air, shit like that.  Regular old card tricks, too, now and then.  It was all part of her “cultural understanding” lessons, learning about the motherfuckers she was gonna rule someday.  Gamzee knew he was heading to see Meenah, but he didn’t remember to be afraid of her until he saw the bared fangs and gleaming imperious hate in her eyes.

It happened slowly – dawning realization, the same way he’d fallen asleep without meaning to, his face squished against the shuttle window and a deck of splatter-ink theater mask playing cards slipping out of his claws and all over the floor.  One minute the Heiress was grinning at him, saying, I’m afraid I clam-n’t make this easy on you unless you’ve brought me some of your shitty clown candy, Gamz – you know that,” all playful-like, and the next instant…  _She knew him._   The smile peeled back into something awful, something ancient and world-swallowing.  The Heiress’s voice became older, richer and somehow sad under all the glitz and swaggering. 

“You’ll regret coming here.  You’ll regret everything,” the Heiress Meenah Peixes said, and Gamzee knew what she really meant.  Where he actually was, and why it could’ve mattered that she had _seen_ him and made some sort of fucking threat like that, and –

And now she was laughing, telling him, “You should see your face, though – like I just broke your heart.  You forgot the candy, didn’t you?” 

Gamzee shook the dream off, like swiping blood off his hands.This wasn’t the smoothest course through the dream bubbles – he had known that shit, of course, but now he felt it deep in the glittery, unground stardust waiting inside his bones.  Ready to be bottled up by some enemy circuses, ready for the twisted-up worship.  This wasn’t the smoothest course through Her Imperious Condescension’s dream bubbles, and now the endgame was slinking closer.  Equius would remind Gamzee that he didn’t actually _kn_ _ow_ anything, later – that the best they could do was keep the ship going, and prepare for whatever threats they knew.  Equius would be right, of course, but Gamzee would be right, too.  In his way.  They were deeper, now.  Deeper into the Empress’s mind, and her history, and too many fucking souls had heard Her Imperious Condescension chirping at them like they were almost, almost friends. 

In the Condesce’s empire, that was a sin worth dying for.  Everybody knew it, didn’t they?     

Outside Gamzee’s respite block windows, the Beforus-dream kept on playing itself out: he saw himself laying cards down for Meenah to study, his shoulders hunched and huge and so strangely free of knotted scars.  It hadn’t been real, and yet it _had_ to be real; it hadn’t been his truth, and yet Gamzee knew he would need plenty more time to chew on what all it had to change about his faith.  The world before Alternia; the oldest gospels he’d been talking about for sweeps, painted tenderly in his own hand.  The dreaming had left him stirred up inside, sure, but it felt like a step for the Mirthful Church, too.  Felt like something that’d get his circus looking at him funny, you know?  It had been one thing to tell them about all he half-remembered… To share it through chucklevoodoos, same as a fear-vision…  But this was something new.

Gamzee checked the time on his husktop – shit, he was late to get his guard duty going, monitoring Cimyra Slapzo’s cell.  Who the fuck was watching that imperial clown guy’s chucklevoodoos, if he’d slacked off so long?   Of course, maybe the whole ship was still caught up in the dreaming, just like he’d all up and been; maybe he’d get there and find Slapzo bantering with some stolen memory of a tiny, pouting Empress.  Could get lucky.  Gamzee wasn’t sure, though – he was a little too tired to be certain of any kinda merciful shit like that.  Had to breathe deep, and remind himself to believe.

Yeah.    

Yeah, and Gamzee’d left the message-recording going with Karkat, too – noticed _that_ before he slammed his husktop shut and bundled himself out back into the worship circus to take up his post.  He tried to switch the “Send Later” feature off, or whatever the fuck, but wasn’t entirely sure the modifications stuck.  Might’ve just sent the longest, weirdest message to his moirail yet.  His claws were shaking with sopor-rot, again, now, and his steps swayed so much on the way to the door that he nearly slammed into a fucking wall.  Not so used to his own self as he should be, just then, huh?

Alternia was cruel, and Beforus was a kind of shiny kind-cruel, in its way…  Maybe, having known a little of both worlds, Gamzee and his friends really would be able to make something new.  Moving beyond the pair of them: stealing a chance at something better.

Gamzee choked out a little laugh despite everything new he had to think about, though – he was imagining Karkat’s face.  Karkat watching him speak in another Gamzee’s voice, flirting so awkwardly through time and space.  He was still sort of grinning to himself – trying to predict what all Karkat might say, you know, and how maybe-happy he’d be thinking Gamzee was pale for him from lifetime to motherfucking lifetime – when he made it down to Cimyra Slapzo and the worship circus’s holding cell.    


	7. In the end, what’s left of the laughing gospel?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHHH, I'm so sorry I'm posting this one on Monday!! I was out of town this weekend, and thought I'd have more "quiet, sit-down and focus" time than I actually did. @_@ Thanks for bearing with me. I hope you had a great week, and have fun with the chapter regardless!!!
> 
> Also... I got that bit about Rage players wanting to burn something broken down and start again from the Extended Zodiac page. :D I wanted to do something different, here, to deal with the "free will" element of a broken universe? Hopefully it works. It's just one way out of many a world like this could go, I think. Ahahaha. Thank you again for reading!!!

The worship circus halls were so quiet as Gamzee hurried down to that imperial clown’s holding cell – only the blurry sway of their engine’s carnival music around, honestly, and a shit ton of sealed-up doors.  So many of his clowns in faith – so many of his teammates – were still all acting out Gamzee’s own Beforus memories in the dark.  They’d be the Jestprophet Bard for a little while yet, maybe, smoothing down rows and rows of laugh-screaming godly playing cards and trying to teach a pouting Heiress some prophesy. 

Gamzee  _did_  pass Rose Lalonde in the hallway, at one point…  Drifting all motherfucking ghostlike, with her mom-lusus tribute notebook hanging loose in her hand and makeup wet and dripping sort of sleepily at the edges of her eyes. 

“Kanaya’s just finished dreaming,” she told Gamzee in a whisper.  The corner of her lip twitched, as if hinting at a bitten-down smile.  “She let me help her back to her room.”

“Damn, sister,” Gamzee chuckled.  “You couldn’t be more flushed if you were in one of Karkat’s motherfucking kissing movies, could you?”

“Oh, hush,” Rose said, but she didn’t say it the same way as she might’ve only a couple nights before.  Gamzee felt like a little of the tiredness that hung around when Rose talked about her feelings might’ve been scrubbed clearer, like scraping hardened sopor off a brother’s best set of juggling clubs.  She studied his face for a second, as if trying to decide what all he might’ve taken from the fucking dream bubble they’d found themselves in.  What he might’ve carried away from Beforus.  It didn’t look like Rose’d really decided on anything, by the time she looked away.  She added, “Dave’s gone somewhere, though.  I’m looking for him.”

Gamzee hurried it up some after that, right?  ‘Cause if Dave was off doing motherfucking mysterious, possibly ironic coolkid shit somewhere else on the ship, that meant Cimyra Slapzo’s chucklevoodoos were all kinds of unguarded.  Maybe the motherfucker’d be able to reach out to Her Imperious Condescension that way, spinning her a pretty, bleeding kinda vision with their team’s weaknesses on display inside it?  Or maybe the vast, jeering rage leaking out from Slapzo’s mind could all flood over his holy circus fleets beyond the dream bubbles, too, dragging so may more clowns in close to catch them.  To stir all that fresh murdermirth into their mess of thought and memory, so the labyrinth would tangle itself up even more and more and more.  So the Empress would find herself with a deeper unholy cosmic web to hide away in.  They’d be giving her a pretty damn thoughtful gift.

When Gamzee stumbled those last long squeaking clown shoe strides into the holding cell, Slapzo wasn’t caught up in the Beforus-dreaming anymore…  But he wasn’t stretching his fizzing blood-magic out into the void, either.  He was sitting sort of bundled up, arms propped on his knee and shoulders more slumped than Gamzee could’ve expected from such a swaggering imperial clown.  It looked like he was playing with something cupped in his palm, except Gamzee couldn’t see what until he got way closer.  It wasn’t much, really – just the finger puppets Slapzo’d worn into custody, twitching with chucklevoodoos and a fistful of shadow.  He could make little spectral scenes dance themselves out in the air, spun from the tips of his fingers.  But you know, not really – it was chucklevoodoos in your head, in a motherfucker’s subconscious, making the thing work.  It wasn’t that strange an act, except Gamzee didn’t trust his own sopor-rotten chucklevoodoos to do a thing like that in battle.  (And it wasn’t like he exactly _liked_ puppets anyway, what with expecting to see that motherfucker Lil Cal around every fucking corner.  He wouldn’t have told Slapzo that shit, though.) It was easier all around to just swing a motherfucking club and watch the meat splatter.  Pick bone shards out of your hair, next, and watch the special stardust glitter deep inside like a promise, like a prophesy.

Gamzee thought he saw one of the puppets cupped in Cimyra Slapzo’s hands take on his own face – the Gamzee on long-lost Beforus’s face, actually? – for just a second, but he couldn’t be sure.  It was a weird motherfucking thing…  There was fear in the air, just then, a deep, water-under-the-ground fear from that most deathly imperial clown himself.  There was fear, but no sign that the chucklevoodoos at work were aimed out beyond that room at all.  Gamzee studied all that as well as he fucking could, shifting his weight from foot to foot a second.  Slapzo was thinking, or playing all by himself, or wrapped up in a prayer.   He flinched when Gamzee said, “Hey,” and folded the puppets up into a fist.

“You didn’t try to run off, or whatever the fuck,” Gamzee said.  “Thanks for that, brother.”

 _You didn’t try to get us fucking culled somehow, either, looks like – you didn’t try to call in your laughing circus troupe from outside the horrorterrrors’ void, or splatter any of us with your burning neon glowstick armor shit while we were dreaming._   You know.  All that was pretty implied, Gamzee thought.

Slapzo shrugged.  Tossed Gamzee a furious look from over his shoulder – furious and hateful, or motherfucking brokenhearted, maybe.  Scrunched up eyebrows, and lips twisted like he wanted to say something – anything – that would make Gamzee’s ears bleed.  Either way, the rows of eyes painted down his cheeks were even more smeared than usual, as if maybe…  At some point…  He’d been crying, or else just trying to wipe his face away.  But that couldn’t be right.

“We call you a blasphemer,” Cimyra Slapzo said.  Gamzee thought for sure there was gonna be more, but there wasn’t.

“Yup,” Gamzee said, after a while.  Just so the air wouldn’t stay so empty.  He flopped himself down by the edge of that holding cell, leaning against the wall.  Closing his eyes for a second, and remembering how assured and faithful it had felt inside the Bard’s own mind.  Inside his other self’s mind, you know?  The Gamzee Makara of Beforus never had to deal with a split-in-half church – never had to deal with mirthful gospels that contradicted one another, and where you could never completely tell what all had been stuck in by Her Imperious Condescension to make the holy clowns into her soldiers.  The Bard had just believed in things, sure as Gamzee used to think he could feel miracles uncurling just beyond the edge of wherever they were, any minute now and honest as blood.  Gamzee sat thinking on what it was like to believe without so many complications – without motherfucking divine family that wanted him culled – until Slapzo spoke again.

“I was sure you were lying,” Cimyra Slapzo said.  “For power.  For your new _‘everybody-get-along-now’_ Heiress.  To reshape the gods.”

“I know,” Gamzee said, slowly.  “Would’ve made some damn good sense, for me to lie.  Who the fuck knows how this ‘universe’ shit works?  Who’d even believe me, if a brother didn’t get a chance to preach?”

“The universe shit is fine,” Slapzo snapped.  “The universe isn’t the problem.”  His voice screamed that he wasn’t fine with any of this shit at all, motherfucker, wasn’t fine with these new memories, or his own thinkpan, or Gamzee looking at him like they might’ve been friends in a different life.   _Not this life_ , Slapzo’s voice said. He wasn’t gonna fall so far as all  _that_ , even if Gamzee thought maybe he saw shadow-and-felt scenes from Beforus twitching between his fingers, now and then.  Old, old gospels creaking on the ceiling - sugary silver and spinning with the light of those twin moons…  Just like Alternia’s moons.  Or maybe Gamzee’s handfuls of fluttering prophet’s cards, spread out on the Heiress’s floor whether she was actually gonna read ‘em or no.  Shit like that. 

“It would’ve been easier if you’d actually been lying,” Cimyra Slapzo said.  “Now, I dunno if I can even ask why you didn’t just go along with the joke.”

“I mean... You can still ask me, if it’d make you feel better.”  Gamzee ran a hand through his tangled curls.  Cleared his throat, just in case he was gonna have to get to a lot of talking. 

“It sort of ruins me, brother,” Slapzo said, as if Gamzee was just some lumpy part of the wall.  As if he hadn’t said anything.  “How come I have to know this shit?  What used to be, what’s broken. You’re trying to make me a blasphemer, too.”

Gamzee didn’t stop the Condesce’s clown from using his Messiahs-given blood magics on his own self - on his finger puppets, and a shifting, shadowy many-faced thing coiling between his fingers.  Didn’t seem to be hurting anybody, and maybe Gamzee sort of understood what it’d be like to realize your own thoughts didn’t fucking fit in your thinkpan anymore. Maybe it was ‘cause he knew what that shit was like, or maybe a brother could blame all that sticky, mourning fear in the air, but he ended up fiddling with quiet little mindless card tricks in the hallway for a while before the ship came back to life again.  Rose had found Dave, who’d kept up with the dreaming longer than pretty much anyone else, that time...  And they were whispering together in low, low voices, just then.  A conversation Gamzee decided wasn’t so much his business.  Someone else was gonna be taking over watching the imperial clown’s chucklevoodoos, soon enough.   

Nepeta and a couple of Gamzee’s clowns brought them some breakfast, then, and she shoved him into his recuperacoon for a little  _actual_  dreaming.  Said Equius would’ve insisted on all that himself just sure as anything, if he hadn’t been down in the worship circus’s engine room trying to keep them steady.  Said some of the ship’s controls were going wonky this far into the void; said Gamzee had been a really patient teacher back on Beforus, and that Equius had huffed, “Well, yes, I would _hope_ he’d be competent,” with a sort of pride when she’d told him so.

There were only a few more nights left before the game would change again – though of course Gamzee couldn’t know it.  No one could, except maybe Rose with her interdimensional husktop thing, and Terezi far away.  Rose _did_ spend a lot of time bent over on that motherfucking husktop, scowling or snickering at some kinda joke or psychoanalysis whatever her other selves were getting up to.  She steered their worship circus away from a couple of truly awful dream bubbles, actually – first from the head of something called “Lord English,” which she said would turn too many motherfuckers upside-down in a bad fucking way (though why they had access to some “Lord English” guy’s memories…  Fuck, Gamzee wasn’t sure he wanted to know) and then from Dave’s mind just after his bro-lusus got culled in the game they’d never had to actually play.  They ended up heading through the first time Rose reached out to the horrorterrors to avoid that last one, but Rose gritted her teeth in the end and said Dave’s privacy was worth it.  If she got a glimpse of what was next, she couldn’t just do nothing.

Rose had worn a gauzy, fluttery veil-hat thing out in a cold rain, the first time Earth’s sky opened up for her and a hundred thousand woven tentacles and all-knowing eyes had stared back.  Gamzee felt her surrender, her relief, her fear and all that noise as if it were his very own.  There had been a dark forest all around, Lalonde Manor looking jumbled and unreal in the distance, and Rose’s arms spread wide under the void...  Letting something otherworldly fill the lungs and veins and soul of her.  Rose hadn’t put together a complete map of the dream bubbles -- 'cause they were constantly shifting around, you know -- but even just the little hints she was gathering about what lay ahead made the nights to come less terrible, Gamzee was sure of it.  She was a quieter, more subtle prophet than their Seer of Mind had ever been, but that didn’t mean Rose wasn’t whispering pieces of a plan to come, slowly, slowly.  Slipping information into just the right thinkpans and then slinking away with a wry little smile.  

Some of those last few nights passed slowly for Gamzee, because this was where he finally woke up crawling through those heartless meteor vents – (as awful as finally looking down at a wound and finding it a million times worse than you’d expected, like you thought it was a shattered bone but _really_ your leg’s come right the fuck off) – or dreaming of the lingering corpse smell in that fridge-prison…  So thick and smothering he could taste it in the back of his throat for a long time after waking up.  These were the nights when he thrashed so awfully he ground his recuperacoon to a pulp and painted his own other self’s threatening messages in the sopor…  _“Are you next? ;o)”_ on the wall, staring down at him when he woke up shaking.  He had to start sharing Equius’s respite block for a while after that, and the fact that his kismesis didn’t complain a ton about him taking up a huge murder clown’s worth of fucking space probably meant he was nervous for him.

Jestif and Heceta broke into Gamzee’s husktop and learned to play old messages from Karkat to unwind his murdermirth-voice and get him sorting out what all had to be true for him, once or twice; Nepeta dreamt of wearing her own blood splattered up her arms, up Gamzee’s juggling clubs, but still wanted to talk about how cute Rose and Kanaya were getting later on.  (Kanaya had begun reading that so-honest tribute story Rose was writing to try and understand her mom-lusus, and even if their Seer of Light seemed pretty embarrassed she _also_ definitely seemed to like the fancy eloquent feedback she was getting.  They read together in the quieter, stiller parts of the ship, too, sometimes, where not so many clowns were offering up honk horn circus act prayers or making space popcorn.  There wasn’t really anywhere in the worship circus where a sister could escape the jaunty carnival-music engine, but they made due with what they had.  Yeah, Gamzee thought it was pretty fucking cute, too.)

And Nepeta still did Gamzee’s hair when she played with Equius’s, sometimes, and camped out with the both of them while Equius fiddled with flashing machines Gamzee didn’t understand in the ship’s engine room.  Things didn’t change the way Gamzee was afraid they would’ve, not completely, even if he didn’t wanna think about the darker times for too motherfucking long.       

He slipped, and his crew caught him.  See?  He got shaken awake by a long-done recorded feelings jam, or something, Karkat smirking at him fondly through the sweeps, and found that he’d trashed _another_ piece of ship Equius was gonna have to fix, now.  It was an unknowing time: a raging time.  But even so, _even so_ , there was usually somebody rubbing Gamzee’s back when they moved on, or somebody who was surprised when he asked whether they thought of him differently after seeing whatever had been festering in his dreams.  The further they went, the less swallowed up Gamzee felt.  They made it through, and it became easier and easier to come home to his own truths.  Easier and easier to think of Lil Cal crouching in the shadowy high-up big top stands and remind himself: _that’s not my life._     

I wore that skin – I walked those selfsame motherfucking steps – but it’s still not my life.

Time passed.  It had to, after all, and Gamzee would've gone on all dreamy-voiced about how baffling and miraculous the people in his life were to anyone who'd stop and listen.  Maybe someday that shit would stop coming as a happy surprise to him, but through the panic and possession, through the claustrophobic unknowing of his other, truest life?  Not yet, brother.   

Their last night on the worship circus ship – Gamzee’s first carnival, his first safe and worshipful big top – started with him having to take over another shift watching Cimyra Slapzo’s cell.  Dave had been playing some kinda handheld game he borrowed off Terezi, sitting guard exactly where he was supposed to be, this time.  He showed Gamzee some of the game’s more outrageous dialogue options before tapping out; he hinted that he had something to ask him, later, about Beforus and Lil Cal and a lot of shit Gamzee didn’t feel rightly qualified to talk about.  And then Dave slipped his headphones back in and wandered away, hands in his pockets, a steely look in his eyes behind his snappy coolkid shades.  Gamzee was alone with the imperial clown, again, and so Slapzo wordlessly unfolded his finger puppets.  His chucklevoodoos.  It seemed like he’d been working on something – putting a little show together – ever since they all dreamed Beforus to life.  Gamzee let him keep at it whenever it was his turn standing guard, just so long as his darkest holy blood-magic didn’t creep beyond that very room.

Slapzo never said “Thank you” or anything about all that, though Gamzee hadn’t really expected him to.  He usually just worked quietly, glaring down at his own hands.  Gamzee thought letting him fiddle away like that was probably some _other_ side to his choice – to that huge, ridiculous set of paths Terezi’d given him to choose between, that could change the course of their Mirthful Church or whatever the fuck.  Who knew how much else he was fucking up, turning a dull swimmy eye and minding his own business? 

Gamzee sighed, thinking on it all.  Tried to switch his mind away to something less shitty, like whatever he could update Karkat on when he recorded a message for him later.  He’d tell him about how Equius had grudgingly come to love the worship circus’s engine room – how he’d decorated it with a little hoofbeast art, claiming the space in that fancy highbrow way he knew best.  He’d tell him about how Kanaya had redesigned a couple clowns’ costumes without asking to be paid or anything…  Just to pass the fucking time, you know?...  And how sad they’d be to see her go off back into the world.  She’d turned down a handful of different offers to join the circus troupe, actually, which wasn’t the sort of thing you’d have seen on a grown-up Alternian ship even just a single sweep before. 

Sure, he’d tell Karkat all kinds of motherfucking things, next time he got the chance.  Gamzee wasn’t gonna get that chance for a while, actually, but that was _another_ thing he couldn’t know yet.   

After some time of sitting in uneasy quiet, Slapzo asked, “So if we – if _you_ – carve away what’s so unholy in the church, what’s left?  Can it even last?  Without the same blood-right subjugglation, without the Empress, without...”  He trailed off.  There was more there, Gamzee thought, but he knew it wouldn't do any good to ask what all it was.

Gamzee thought.  He only had one answer to a question like that, actually, but he knew it wasn’t the sort of answer Cimyra Slapzo was gonna like.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “I guess we’ll figure that out as we go.  There’s good shit in there, too – there’s our only twofold gods.  I don’t wanna burn the whole motherfucking thing down, or anything.” 

Terezi had said that burning something broken into helpless ash was what most Rage players would’ve wanted to do – and Gamzee _had_ been the Bard of Rage in that game they’d never gotten around to playing.  He knew that, now.  Except, he wasn’t a Rage player, here, not in the same way.  He had a chance to choose something else, in this world, the only universe this version of himself could ever truly live.  Gonna pluck the divinity out of his gospel and rebuild, if he could.  Trying to keep Slapzo alive – that had been part of it.  Gathering as much of his family in faith together as he could and trying to make a new home, a home focused on the paradise planet so long ago foretold – that was part of it, too.

It might have been enough.  He felt like it was, even if he wasn't about to swear on his cackling gods, or anything.  He could only really try.  Just like Feferi, with her horrorterror-vows and her revolution.  Just like Dave, who kept misreading the Alternian-script commands on his borrowed video game and screencapping the most unlikely death scenes to show Terezi later. 

Gamzee tried to explain to Cimyra Slapzo why it might be enough – tried to preach to him the way he’d preached to his own circus – and by the end that centuries-old imperial clown was laughing.  Burying his face in his hands, so he got neon paint on his finger puppets.  He wiped his nose on those lacy sleeves of his, and Gamzee realized they were sitting on almost equal ground.  Almost. Facing each other through the gleaming ethereal teleportation-forcefield wall of that cell, anyway.

“ _Fuck you_ , Makara,” Slapzo said, again.  That was one of the first things he’d ever said to Gamzee, though his voice sounded a little different, now.  More like it did in recordings Sollux had dragged out of Her Imperious Condescension’s space, when he was talking to those assembled berserker crowds.  Getting ‘em ready for the Empress's orders.  Ready for blood.  “But you know what?"

"What?"

"When I was in that vent thing – when _you_ were in that vent, in another world?  Whatever.  That dream, you know the one."

Gamzee nodded.  Sure, he did.  How could he not?

"I knew you wanted to preserve us.  That wasn't a deserter's mind...  I felt how much the church means to you.”

“Yes,” said Gamzee.  “I mean, always.”

“I hate you,” said Slapzo, “And I can’t hate you.”         

“And I get how you can feel that way, brother.  Probably a lot of motherfuckers are feeling the exact same shit."

Slapzo rubbed at his eyes – at his real eyes, blinking blearily above all the painted ones.  He said, “Messiahs help me.  You’re gonna make some kinda…  Stitched-together hybrid church, or something.  Beforus, and here...  Oh who knows."  A deep, messy breath.  "You’re bringing in such young, quick blood.  New clowns.  New hymns.   _'Bleeding as equals.'_ Right?"

"Yeah, man.  Yeah."

"I wish I could be angrier.  Fuck...  I've been the Condesce's Subjugglator for so, so long."

Gamzee didn’t say anything, then, for long enough that Cimyra Slapzo’s breathing got a little less choking.  For long enough that the imperial clown started scrubbing some of the paint off his finger puppets and got back to work.  Gamzee let his eyes flicker away from Slapzo's puppets, from his twitching, uncanny chucklevoodoo-shadows. 

It wasn’t long after that when the Empress’s first attack came, shaking so much of that worship circus apart.     


	8. The Condesce has to be so pissed we aren’t all dead, huh?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :D Happy (middle of the night) Sunday!! I hope your week went super well, and this chapter is fun, in its way! Although this one's a little sad. Sorry. I hope it turned out okay, anyway, and... Please forgive any mistakes I might've made. I'll do my best to fix anything I find!! As always, it means a lot to me that you're reading it!! Thank you. :')

If Gamzee Makara had known that would be their last night on his very first worship circus ship, he probably would’ve taken some pictures.  Immortalized the dining hall, maybe, or Equius’s engine room with the framed hoofbeast portraits and that one really awkward (and/or artistically sophisticated?) statue that might’ve been permanently affixed to the floor.  You get it, brother…  If he had even thought  _maybe_ that shit wasn’t gonna last, he could have set aside time to appreciate the acoustics in their particular holy big top a little more.  He would’ve scrubbed the nasty other-world dream messages off his respite block walls before saying goodbye, too.  It was a little shitty to think that his other self’s hysterimurderous “Are you next? ;o)” would be scrawled in almost, almost his own handwriting up there, all the way until the room just stopped existing.  Fell away like bones crushed to stardust in a motherfucker’s first, like chucklevoodoos flickering out, like a world cracked apart by a sky full of unfathomable, video game-related meteors.  But there you fucking go.

It was what it was.

And Gamzee didn’t know, anyway.  Not until he was helping Jestif clean some kind of slithery void parasite thing out of one of the ship’s fanciest popcorn machines and felt the whole worship circus shudder.  It was as if a pulse had rattled through the thing, trying to shake it into pieces.  Gamzee would talk it through with his crew later on, and some people would say their first thoughts when it happened went like, _“Oh, so that’s how an imperial ship’s destabilizing blast feels!  I was firing those fucking things at aliens for actual sweeps and never even knew.”_ Or like, _“That was a pretty dramatic way to fall into dreaming.  Wonder what kind of bubble this is?”_

But it wasn’t the dream bubbles’ fault, of course – they were still heading through one of Heceta’s sorcery-dance classes, actually, and would be for a while yet.  But it was close enough to the Empress’s soul…  Close enough to those deep cold dream bubbles where she’d buried herself away…  That she’d sent something she was puppeting out to attack them.  Drones, probably, or the memory of drones some fucking way... With hanging heads and static-eyes, behind controls they couldn’t hope to understand.  No matter how many people dipped in and out of dreaming about being Heceta, spinning ribbons crackling heavy with chucklevoodoos – fabric slipping into that skittering centipede lusus of hers, then into long dark roads lined with circus tents, all that – Her Imperious Condescension had noticed them.  The first ship-quake was followed up pretty motherfucking fast by another – their shields were nice and raised, of course, but Alternia’s Empress stocked up on the very best weapons.  Splinters were already forming along the worship circus’s back, and the manic spinning carnival music engine was beginning to lose its song.  Slipping up, a little.  Dissonant, like it’d gone sour or was just up and forgetting all the motherfucking words.               

Gamzee’s first thought when it happened wasn’t much like his crew’s, but it was sort of like Rose Lalonde’s.  He thought, “Oh fuck.  She warned us,” and as he thought that shit the wriggling void parasite thing dripped between his gloved claws and blinked up with a hundred shifting oily eyes from deep within the popcorn maker’s guts.  It hadn’t really been too long ago that the Condesce had told Gamzee – told all of them – that they would regret coming into her dream bubbles.  That they would regret everything.  She’d sneered all that wearing her own younger, far more innocent self’s face, and a lot of gold hanging from her near-transluscent ear fins.  She’d reached through the dreaming to make sure they all knew damn well that she wasn’t gonna make it easy on them.             

Of course they shot back at that smaller, circling attack-craft – of course they exploded it out of the sky with death like fireworks, like confetti in the void. But by that point, the deed was done, and it was all Equius could do to keep life support going a little longer.  Rose Lalonde had been dreaming until the destabilizing blast shook her awake, wincing and suddenly realizing she could never actually have Heceta’s chucklevoodoos to dance with.  Rose’s first true thoughts feeling the ship strain and scream all around her had been: _“It’s her.”_   And then,  _“I should probably consult our other universes.”_              

And so Gamzee froze for a second, breathing in deep through his bared fangs, and Jestif was like, “Fuck it.  Maybe we’re better off just gifting the machine to this poor creature?  Toss it out of the circus.  See what happens.”  They ran a claw tip along some of the cracks in their mask, resigned.  Glanced at Gamzee with sly, tired eyes.  “It’s not like we’d have much fun with popcorn anyway, if the ship’s dead meat.”                 

They let that popcorn machine fall out into the horrorterrors’ void, really quick – whatever else a choice like that could possibly lead to.  Horrorterrors with a cheerfully painted-up popcorn thing tangled in their tentacles?  Tiny caramel corn pieces getting nibbled at by beaks the size of Alternia?  Something like that shit. Jestif waved to it as it went spiraling out through hazy, warbling sorcery-dance classroom scenes, offering up more and more dramatic, fast-talking jester-speak “Farewell”-s until they got a laugh out of Gamzee.  He’d sort of needed it, too.  By that point, the ship was trembling again, honestly, and the spiraling engine-music had become almost a screech.  They were late for Rose’s briefing session – the Rose-es on her interdimensional server thing had spoken, and she had ideas about what to do next.  They had choice-paths, you know it, and just like Terezi Pyrope back in Alternian space she was gonna try and help them navigate as best she could.  

They could retreat back into the dream bubbles, apparently, holding themselves together with Equius’s mysteriously highbrow not-cussing and prayers, or they could press on.  Most choices boiled down to that, just like most breathing things could get torn down to pulp and bone and so much fear.                

They were gonna press on, for a war maybe won sooner and more lives maybe saved.  Gamzee agreed with all that, sure, and so had most everyone else when Rose laid the choices at their feet.  They were gonna swarm from different angles if they could...  Some kinda battle-strategy shit Gamzee nodded at and nodded at, getting led along to Rose’s briefing session by a very serious-looking Dave Strider who still had Terezi’s handheld game crammed in his back pocket.                  

Gamzee barely had time to learn they were all being evacuated, carried off into escape pods, by the time Equius was shoving him into one.  He didn’t have time to run back for his husktop, even.  Didn’t have time to gather up the paintings off Equius’s engine room wall, or fish smuggled snacks out from under his paint-smeary clothes piles.  The Condesce’s weaponry was meant to destabilize worlds, in the end.  There was only so long Equius was gonna be able to hold them all together.                    

Gamzee  _did_  have time to insist someone gather the Subjugglator General Cimyra Slapzo up into an escape pod, but really that meant he and Equius were some of the last to leave…  And they had to fly around with a trussed-up imperial clown who’d already made it pretty fucking clear he wasn’t Gamzee’s biggest fan.  They watched the worship circus ship crumble behind them, and Gamzee felt a low scream building in his chest.  All the escape-pod fleets kept on high alert, gathered together and listening to their Seer of Light explain how to hopefully follow their choice-paths without letting them unravel between their claws like knots in motherfucking Silly String.  Gamzee thought her voice was impressively level and soft, considering the circumstances.  Sisterly.  Rose Lalonde kept her voice calm and motherfucking sisterly, whatever the fuck else was going on.  Whatever they’d just then lost.                

A home, wasn’t it?                 

A home Gamzee’d made all by his own self.               

He had known the dream bubbles would be fucking awful, in their way, but he listened to Rose’s advising just as well as he knew how.  He leaned into Equius a little, honestly, and felt a too-strong hand straighten his shirt in a gesture that might’ve been sort of like comfort. Might've been sort of irritated, too.  Equius scrubbed some popcorn machine grease off Gamzee’s back, or... You know. Tried to, though he ended up scolding his own hands. Gamzee appreciated the idea of all that, anyway, just like he knew Rose would appreciate the wide proud eyes Kanaya was giving her in the background of all those choice-path prepping video chats.  Trusting eyes, really.  Kanaya had felt Rose fall -  _been_  Rose as she let the horrorterrors flood her like so much drowning inky water - and she’d seen her rise. She saw her now, maybe in a way Gamzee didn’t know how to, as Rose read aloud some of the other-Rose-es’s quips and tried to rally up their friends, rally up their circus, for a wobbly final stretch.                 

They’d put together another worship circus ship once the war was won.  If the war was won.  Gamzee told Equius about that in a low, grumbly voice once they all got going, and Equius corrected him whenever he listed some sort of feature that’d be “structurally unsound” or “literally, one-hundred percent impossible.”  All that helpful shit, as the fleet of escape pods arranged itself and set on into the dream bubbles so much more stumbling.  So much more unguarded.  It was even more desperately important to keep each other awake, now.  The Empress would attack again, right?  And again and again, until she’d swatted them away like so many flies hanging around something all melted with rot.  Or, until they got her like they’d been sent in to fucking do.                

Gamzee had his worship circus’s engine music whirling around in his head as he fell asleep, though.  Everything felt so quiet, without that engine’s calliope.  Like a mime’s ship, almost, or as if the escape pod fleet wasn’t whimsically designed to look like a bunch of balloons caught in the wind at all.                

Except that it _was_ , and they were caught in something that could fuck a brother over a lot more strangely than any motherfucking wind.  Only Equius saw the dream bubbles they were traveling through as glassy, empty void, after all.  So many of their escape pods fired on each other, before it was over...  Though it was sort of a miracle how not too many of their shots actually hit.  One pod actually swerved off and never came back, only static over its communicator thing... And more of them shut off all power, caught up in the dreaming – including fucking life support, man! – and had to get jolted back awake by someone who knew.  Or not, you know.  Or not, if the rest of everyone was trying to fend off one of the Empress’s latest attacks.  Or not, if there were too many lives to keep ahold of, and people noticed just too fucking late.   

That was the worst time Gamzee’d had out in the horrorterrors’ void - the last handful of nights, before they split up to surround the Empress’s sanctuary.  He poured out Faygo for the ships that ended up lost...  Kept on pouring it out until he didn’t have any left to drink.  He piloted the escape pod while Equius slept, and knew he couldn’t trust whatever fucking dream they were flying through; he comforted his crew as best he could, no matter how far scattered they were.  Hardly time to breathe deep, those last few nights, brother.  Hardly room to juggle right, in a squished-up escape pod like that, and Cimyra Slapzo just kept on twisting those finger puppets and shadows up between his hands, muttering weird shit to himself Gamzee really didn’t wanna think about.  (Yeah, Gamzee kept the guy unbound most of the time, after he got sure enough on how he wasn’t about to try anything.  Equius tsk-ed at him for it, but Gamzee knew all too fucking well what it was like to hurtle through space all trapped and shit. Or, his other self knew, and the universes had decided to spread the hurt around like tracking blood over the floor. No chucklevoodoos were leaking through that escape pod, though, which was worth a lot in the end.  Worth enough, just like it'd been before.) 

Slapzo was making something meant to be performed someday, that much was getting clearer and clearer. Rehearsing lines, and all that noise.  But that had to be the last of Gamzee’s problems - he was busy trying to blast empty-husk drones off Kanaya's escape pod without taking her down, too, and awful stuff like that.  Gamzee’d never been the broken universe’s best motherfucking shot, you know?  His sopor-shaking hands had never felt blurrier, never felt worse, than when the only motherfucker awake with him was fucking Slapzo (not paying attention, and probably not giving a shit about some stranger what never agreed to fucking bow to him,) and some of his friends’ worlds might end thanks to his own rot. The prayers he muttered then were some of the most desperate in all his wound-up memory. Not the sort of prayers he’d ever write down, or hope to speak even one more motherfucking time. 

They made it through.  Sometimes split up between dream bubbles - (so Gamzee dreamt of taking down an Alternian operative on Earth and somehow fitting into Dave Strider’s fucking slick clothes, even as Dave himself dreamt of being Nepeta and first realizing Karkat was cute if you squinted, shit like that) - they made it though.  Those last nights dragged, and everything ached by the end of them.  If Rose hadn’t been there nudging them all along, Gamzee was pretty motherfucking sure he would’ve never been able to set squeaky clown shoe in a worship circus again.  But he kept on charting out plans for the new home he’d build, updating Equius when he needed,  _needed_  to clear his head.  It wasn’t too long before Equius began suggesting modifications... Wasn’t too long before the future ship began to feel like something they’d make together, and a few of Gamzee’s clowns offered their two cents over the comms, laughing nervously or teasingly questioning the size of whatever horse stable the ship might fucking have. It was never in question this particular ship would have a stable, though.  They’d spent enough time traveling together to know that fucking much. 

It would’ve been better if Gamzee could’ve messaged Karkat, somehow, but they had to keep in touch with all the other escape pods all the motherfucking time. Only had so much power to burn.  Gamzee composed video rant after video rant in his head, and hoped to the Messiahs he wouldn’t feel like he needed to say half those words by the time he got up close with his moirail again. 

Gamzee and his worship circus crew weren’t supposed to be out there, in the dream bubbles. They weren’t supposed to have to keep track of a fleet of escape pods, and they weren’t supposed to die, not any of them, until Gamzee thought he knew a little of what it would be like growing old as a highblood... Watching the world change, and pieces of it fall apart like a worship circus ship blasted to helplessness from deep inside its metal bones. This wasn’t the smoothest choice path, sure. This didn’t feel smooth at all, as Gamzee lived it, and he was honestly a little motherfucking surprised when he made it to Rose’s final, exhausted briefing session before what might’ve been the point of that whole fucking trip. 

Surprised, and grateful.  Surprised, and painting on his clown face again with claws so shaky he jabbed some paint in his motherfucking eye and had to hold really still while Equius swabbed it out with one of his smelly towels. 

They were going to split up and try to fade away - so many scrambled, shambling  pieces, ducking out of the Condesce’s sight.  Divided between dreams. Rose thought she’d traced paths that could do it...  She thought she’d heard enough from the other universes’ Seers to put together what might confuse even their world-swallowing Empress, now, as all the motherfucking pieces were nearly set. They’d have to divide and sneak in, and see if they could take her out. Using all those stolen other-universe powers they weren’t supposed to have...  All those stolen chances that should’ve run out long before they could take the fucking shot. 

It didn’t feel real. Gamzee still expected to see his fallen clowns’ names flicker onto the comm screen, calling in.  He woke up surprised when he couldn’t hear their ship’s rambling engine, anymore.  Maybe it'd take a long time, before he stopped being all motherfucking surprised on it.

It didn’t feel real, but it had to be, and then it would all be over so

So

Soon. 


	9. Is this how it ends, then?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again!! Welcome to... Gasp.... The second to last chapter??? Penultimate. Geez, it's quite a thought, as far as I'm concerned. Thank you so so so much for sticking with the story so far, and I truly hope you enjoy the chapter! I ended up scrapping/rewriting a whole lot of this one, so I hope it turned out okay. Please forgive any mistakes I made.... And have a great day! 
> 
> Thank you!!! :')

It happened in stages, which Gamzee drifted through as if from dream bubble to dream bubble.  As if from thought to thought, like he was somebody else’s motherfucking juggling club, hurled around and maybe caught in a splattering sweaty palm, maybe dropped on the big top floor.  What else could a brother even motherfucking do, you know?  All their sweeps had led them to this, and every now and then Gamzee was beginning to see what Equius saw: the void hollow everywhere, and too many incomprehensible coiling tentacles knitted tight around these furthest dream bubbles…  Sinuous and strangling, close enough to crush them all.  The horrorterrors, Feferi’s eldritch gods, her coldest blood-right, were watching through the haze of all their unburied memories.  Gamzee and his friends would have one chance.  The natural stars were so far away, and home was so, so much further. 

Equius had gotten used to seeing the horrorterrors there, with their oceans of glassy unblinking eyes, with their ragged beaks and pulsating, uncanny breathing...  Like wounds opening, like abominations slipping into the light and then out again with every heave of void and ancient flesh.  Gamzee kept on hoping Rose was alright, sitting with her lips clenched tight and her back to the escape pod windows, knowing what was whispering behind her.  Kanaya squeezed her knee, sometimes.  Gamzee’d seen it happen during that fancy final briefing transmission, although what with the angle Rose probably thought no motherfuckers could’ve possibly noticed. 

Well, except the fucking horrorterrors, right?  They saw everything, for fucking sure.  Haha – that was a cruel enough joke that Cimyra Slapzo might’ve told it.

But – the motherfucking stages.  That’s what all Gamzee had to focus on, now, even if his own part wouldn’t come in for a while yet.    

First, Gamzee and the rest of their team sat tight as Nepeta Leijon did what Rose said only she really could.  Some kinda Rogue of Heart magic – stealing the Empress’s soul for everyone else, or some shit – and some kinda trained-up starving hunter’s skill.  Nepeta slipped off on her own, see, moving all liquid and as feline-quick as one of their clownish balloon-themed escape pods could possibly go.  She slunk past the Condesce’s patrol drones like she’d been doing it all her fucking sweeps, which you know she sort of fucking had.  Only, on Alternia and when she was still a midblood kitten with dirt between her toes and smell of blood and flowers in the air.

Nepeta was a blur out the corner of some sorry motherfucker’s eye.  She was death bobbing around in a multicolor balloon-ship, and the few drones that caught on to her were left floating and silent in her wake…  Claw-carved and empty as old bones splattered in shipping-wall paint and kicked to the corner of her cave; nameless and left to a grave among the horrorterrors.  She could slip their souls out like Heceta drawing her dancing ribbons out of a motherfucking hat.

Aradia would probably have something to say about that horrorterror-grave thing, though Gamzee still thought graves in general were sort of motherfucking weird.  Except…  The floor of that escape pod was probably gonna be sticky with Faygo poured out for brothers and sisters in faith lost to the dream bubbles for a long, long time.  Not too different from the way Jade had left joke books propped against John Egbert’s human tombstone, in the end. 

Her Imperious Condescension’s true mind was at the rotten heart of those dream bubbles, and it was Nepeta’s job to hunt it down and not be seen.  Meanwhile Equius was glued to the comms the whole fucking time, you know, brother, and Gamzee sat with his eyes all half-lidded beside him.  He admired the play of gaudy flashing control-panel light in the grease of his kismesis’s hair…  He tried to work out some of the aches in his back, from hunching over in a too-small escape pod ship all motherfucking night…  All that.  He listened to the crunch of drone exoskeletons and the crackle of those electrically-charged claws Jade made for Nepeta every now and again, too – all that shit filled the escape pod when it came, so even a jaded imperial clown like Slapzo murmured, “Ooo,” a couple times and complimented Nepeta’s bloodthirst.  Also, her running roleplay-style commentary.  That shit was cat-adventure gold.

Equius only had to pry Nepeta out of dream bubble-visions a couple times, but each time he called her name his moirail fucking answered.  It was enough to make Equius’s eyes go melty and gentler behind his splintered shades.  Gamzee thought of the way Karkat could draw him back out of godly hysteria and murdermirth, watching them.  Karkat with soft warm hands on Gamzee’s cheeks, working messiahs-honest miracles with some pitying murmurs and a little faith.  Fuck, Karkat was gonna be so pissed if Gamzee died out here.  There were so many half-composed messages to Karkat churning around in Gamzee’s thinkpan, but he hadn’t been able to send fucking any of them by the time Nepeta found her way through the constantly shifting dreams to their fish-queen’s heart.

It wasn’t supposed to be find-able, but Her Imperious Condescension only had a normal, breakable soul, in the end.  A hero of Heart could fuck her up just the same as a drone, if you got ‘em a good enough chance...  If you didn’t need her nice and whole for an Heiress challenge ceremony, soon enough, trying to all re-hatch an empire and shit.  They moved in, anyway, splitting up and surrounding the dream bubble that held the Condesce’s hiding soul.  That was the next stage.  Nepeta directed them, and Equius did his motherfucking best to keep everyone awake.  They all tried to keep each other awake, you get it, no matter how unreal the whole thing felt.  No matter what was waiting for them in the deepest corners of that centuries-old mind. 

The horrorterrors watched, their maws sticky and full of swallowed, ruined stars.  They watched, and did nothing.  The Condesce would feel so betrayed when she realized, but she didn’t realize yet. 

Gamzee’s role would come when she did, and when she came for them as completely as she could.  When their teams’ heroes needed a path cleared for them, needed drones torn to holy twitching limbs.  If there was one good thing about bringing a worship circus of murder clowns into the dream bubbles, to wander around the funhouse mirrors of their own motherfucking minds, it was this: they had been bred to cull.  To cull in the name of their twofold bloody gods, in the name of their friends, in the name of their empire.  Her Imperious Condescension probably never thought that gory purple-blooded destiny she’d helped create would turn itself on her this way, but…  What the messiahs willed would come to be.  Gamzee knew his own role here just about as well as the fizz and sputtering of his deathly noble blood.

He wasn’t as afraid as he might’ve been.  Wasn’t as afraid as he _should’ve_ been, maybe, though he tasted fear all around like they were swimming through a sweet clinging syrup meant for drowning the unholy in.  The kind that left the air so thick with sugar you could taste it on your tongue and it’d burn a brother’s throat just by breathing nearby.  He had his grip tight on Cimyra Slapzo’s chucklevoodoos, but he was gonna have to release him to let the murdermirth in.  That old Subjugglator General had asked if he could join the fight, himself…  Unshackled and raging against the same Batterwitch that fucked up his church, too…  To which Gamzee’s crew suggested no fucking way.  Slapzo had some tricks up those ruffled sleeves, motherfuckers said, and sure enough Gamzee believed in them.  

Jestif was gonna use some of their chemical vials to knock that imperial clown out, when it mattered.  A shot in the neck, quick and almost painless for the sake of their family in faith.

At least, that was the plan so far.

“Fine then,” Slapzo said.  “Better strategy than I expected from you, Makara.”  Gamzee thought he sounded nearly as venomous as all Jestif’s exploding vials, and those finger puppets were staring at him like they knew what was coming next.  Hanging limp, like Slapzo was a balloon animal and the air had just started going out.  Depressed, or resigned, or…  Gamzee wasn’t gonna think over it too much, even though he honestly sort of wanted to.  They weren’t friends.  Not in this life.

There was a time when Gamzee would’ve tried to be friends with motherfucking anybody.  Tried with his whole heart, sinking into the sand of a grey cold beach and talking to whoever would let him go on.  It hadn’t been only the sopor-rot and loneliness at work, back then.  The side of Gamzee that wanted to befriend a wicked galaxy…  That was still around, just wrapped up tight under a little better sense.  Also, Equius was nudging him and scowling every now and then, as if to say, _“Focus, Highblood,”_ in one of his prissiest voices.  So Gamzee let Cimyra Slapzo slip from his thinkpan until a little later.    

The goofy balloon-ship fleet entered the Condesce’s final dream slowly.  One at a time, so spread-apart and small.  It wasn’t like Gamzee’d thought it would be.  Maybe he’d expected a throne room, excepted shell mosaics bleeding gold, expected a rainbow of blood in the sand.  Like the first dream, when he’d gotten swallowed up in the dream bubbles nights and nights ago. 

Nah, man. 

Gamzee was a young Heiress again, when the dream came for him, only with aching cold scars the Meenah Peixes he’d taught prophesy to had never worn.  He was standing on a heartless sprawling platform with all his friends gathered close, and he knew – knew more keenly than hunger, than the way he suddenly wanted a giant statue of himself just so motherfucking badly – that they had lost the game.  They had lost the game, and that game was their purpose in the universe.  They had lost the game, and there was nowhere to go, now, and nothing to be.  No more worthwhile shiny trinkets to steal.  Nothing. 

Everybody around was a stranger, of course, though Gamzee felt for a second that he knew them just as well as his own best motherfucking friends.  That motherfucker with the tweeting whistle slung around his neck probably knew something was up with Meenah that night, but was shoving his own intuition down with mouthfuls of burning words, words that somehow – infuriatingly – hadn’t yet solved everything.  The girl with a ton of different skateboard variations stuffed in her inventory wore sharp red shades and a relentless smile, but it took Gamzee longer than he might’ve expected to remember Terezi Pyrope, or Redglare, or anything beyond Meenah’s memories.  These were his friends, and this was his life, and he’d run away from the coddling throne of Beforus a little while ago, now.

Bangles clicked on Gamzee’s arms, catching the light like they meant to blind a motherfucker – like bony funhouse-mirror Feferi arms, in a way.  Gamzee shifted his webbed toes inside Meenah’s shoes; he heard himself talking, though it didn’t matter really what all he fucking said.  The false confidence leaked out of his voice like grease from a fistful of the best carnival funnel cake…  It might have been humbling, except that he knew exactly what he had to fucking do.

Gamzee killed all his friends in an instant. 

No.  Meenah Peixes killed all her friends and reset the world without flinching, without letting herself doubt. 

To win the game.

Selling herself and her something-almost-like-innocence – selling her friends and her universe for the terror of Alternia to come.  For its strength. For its murdermirth.  For the game their broken universe was never meant to even fucking play.

And wasn’t that just motherfucking hilarious as the Vast Honk its own self?  They’d been hatched for an uncreated planet, too.  If the game was never played in their universe, Her Imperious Condescension wasn’t supposed to exist, here.  None of this was _supposed_ to be happening at all, at all, at all.

Gamzee felt his breath choke in his chest, like swallowing glass.  The dream reset.

And he was standing on that same heartless sprawling platform, again.  He felt Meenah choose Alternia over and over and over, and each time he thought he sunk a little deeper into the cold well of fear Her Imperious Condescension carried inside her.  What had it meant?  What had any of it ever motherfucking meant?  He chose Alternia, and he died.  He watched the soft-eyed cat girl with knee socks and glitter eyeshadow die.  He watched the mime with pockets full of horrible riddles and a smile sort of infuriating like his own – no, like Gamzee Makara’s, whoever that was – die and die and die.  He watched it again

And again

And again

And created Alternia each and every time, until Equius was shaking his shoulder and cracking that non-world open like glass.                 

Gamzee woke up in the final dream bubble laughing.  He woke up cackling and clutching at his soft, shaking insides.  He woke up knowing better than he ever had what exactly Alternia was, and he thought maybe he saw the dream bubble for itself a little, too.  It was squished up nice and close to a horrorterror’s shadowy seething skin, for one thing.  It was full of drones and their clicking organic drone-ships, and the Empress herself was sitting cross-legged on the floor by a shadow of her own younger, other-world self.  She was watching the scene play out with something unreadable on her face and her royal trident balanced across her lap like an afterthought.  Her battleship loomed behind her, though it seemed the psionics inside were caught up in dreaming.

This was the Condesce’s Alternia, her choice and her legacy.  This is what she was fighting to drag on and on and on, whether it had ever had the point she meant for it or not.  This was what she was going to see die, if her empire fell, and Gamzee caught himself wondering for the first time how exactly a person like Meenah Peixes was gonna feel about it.  Maybe there would be something like relief buried deep under all the hate and ancient venom.  Maybe there would be something like a final goodbye.  

Her friends died again and again and again.

The horrorterrors stared down, shifting like a galaxy of meat and knowing eyes around their unchosen daughter.  And the deals they’d made?

The deals that were coming for Her Imperious Condescension right, right then?

The next stage came to life quickly, just like Rose Lalonde had said it would.  The Condesce stood when she noticed one of their ships, shaking dreams out of her eyes…  She grabbed for whatever minds she could find – she was planning her usual little tricks like, _“Now ram your ships together, alright?  I want to see if there’s another clown church confetti effect when you die!”_ or, _“I have been losing some of my drones lately.  Maybe you should stay and be the start of a new army?”  _Only, not so many of those tricks exactly came true, and that was all because of Dave Strider. 

After sweeps of hunting the Batterwitch, Dave was standing on the roof of his escape pod just then, slouched right before her.  He peeked at Her Imperious Condescension over the top of his shades and smirked.  For a second, he looked uncannily like his bro-lusus – cold-eyed.  Confident.  Like part of him had died a long time before.  But then the second passed, and he said, “This is for Earth, too.  No, you know what?  This is for my bro John Egbert, okay?”

And then he added something snarky Gamzee didn’t exactly get – something about an old Earth president, and a rap duet that never got to up and fucking be? - and he flashstepped forward to slip his broken sword against the empress’s throat.  But just before she could react... Just before he could’ve slit her open...  Dave froze Her Imperious Condescension in time, so’s she couldn’t run, just like Aradia had taught him.  The fury on her face was enough to boil blood.  Dave was wearing maybe the widest smile Gamzee’d ever fucking seen on him. 

A hero of Time could only hold that corner of reality still for so long, they all knew, and Kanaya was gonna have to play her part really fucking fast.  They were nearly there, but Dave was straining to keep the Condesce stuck and the drones swarmed in.  Rose and Nepeta had to protect Kanaya as she worked to heal that unreal, not-meant-to-be space – Sylph magic, whatever the fuck it was, took precision and care.  Gamzee shouldn’t have even bothered swallowing down his laughter.  He’d let the holy rage grab him up soon enough.

That’s what had to come next, except that for a little while Gamzee and Equius were just holding down that one escape pod of theirs.  Equius blasted at whatever of the Empress’s forces came their way, teeth gritted and cracking, a towel draped over his shoulders.  They were waiting for Jestif, see – for the chemicals they would slide all numbing and cruel-kind into Slapzo’s veins that would be sure to keep him sleeping until all the night was done whatever happened to any of them.  But then, Gamzee saw something like Jestif’s mask crushed in a mess of fizzing purple meat.  He saw Heceta scream, face split open like it had been carved with a crooked knife, and he saw his circus falling.  Not all of them, not completely, but enough. 

Enough that he felt the rage bubbling up in him anyway – sweet sticky grape soda seeping through the bottle cap before you’d even opened the damn thing up.  Dripping down your hands, staining a brother’s claws with syrup.  Enough that when Cimyra Slapzo saw where he was looking and said, “Oh, fuck.  You guys are screwed.  Now, I wonder what a _smart_ leader would do?”  Gamzee shrugged.  Enough that he let Slapzo squeeze his claws almost like a friend might, and didn’t think on any of that shit until much, much later.   

The voice that answered, “Knock yourself out, motherfucker.  Bring the wicked subjugglation, if you fucking want,” was barely Gamzee’s own.  There would be more of his family to mourn, if he got the chance.  The floor would be so fucking sticky, Equius might lose one of his shoes.

“You know, if I wanted to cull you I could’ve done it a whole handful of times on this one little escape pod flight,” Slapzo said.  “And if I wanted to help…  Do you wanna hear a knock-knock joke?  Like the one you told me?”

“No, my brother,” said Gamzee, and he was practically already climbing out into the shit storm.  

By all rights, maybe Gamzee should’ve refused it when Slapzo shoved the puppet show he’d been working on into his hands, then – into his inventory – and climbed out the escape pod’s hatch to wreak a little havoc…  But he didn’t.  Maybe that was the last step, to that choice-path he’d started down so long ago, about how the Subjugglator General’s fate could change their church.  You know what?  Probably so, though it would have to matter later.  It’d just have to wait its motherfucking turn.

Gamzee didn’t watch the puppet show play itself out, yet.  He didn’t know what it would preach to the clowns beyond the dream bubbles.  He didn’t know how many drones Cimyra Slapzo was gonna take down – a whole fucking ton – until he’d done it, or the rude jokes he’d make as he went about the kill.   He definitely didn’t know the neon-splattering old Subjugglator was going to die until he was one of the broken things Aradia laid out with little party hats on, once it was all over and she was trying to figure out how to throw a human funeral.   

(Dave said she did an amazing job with that thing, but Jade’s expression sort of said otherwise.  Gamzee kept his mouth nice and shut.)

Not yet, though.

 Slapzo’s hands would’ve been ripped off, by then, so he couldn’t spin shadows anymore even if he’d wanted to.  His smug little smile would be gone for fucking good, whatever contradictions he’d hidden behind it, whatever knock-knock joke he’d been planning to tell.  His clown-paint eyes would be staring wide, wide open all the time, as though they didn’t realize they’d belonged to a dead man.  Heceta would’ve carefully stuck Jestif’s mask back together one last time, and propped it over what used to be their face.  Her hands would be shaking, and she wouldn’t be able to look anybody in the eye yet.  She’d fall against Gamzee’s side like she couldn’t even bear to stand up.  Gamzee would rub her shoulder, and there would still be acidic drone blood under his nails.  He’d shoot Karkat some motherfucking helpless eyes, and Karkat would mouth, _“Just stay put!”_

Not yet.

First, Gamzee raged.  He raged as Dave Strider held Her Imperious Condescension frozen between breaths.  He raged as she broke free for an instant and stabbed Dave deep, deep in the leg with her gleaming trident, and he raged as Dave grabbed at her again and held Time tighter even as he bled warm salty red all over his fancy coolkid shoes.   Gamzee raged as Rose’s knitting needles flashed silken rotting light, and the horrorterrors watched her with something unnervingly close to love.  He twisted spines and pried skulls open with his fingers jammed deep in the eye sockets – he became a weapon of those twofold gods, even as the dream bubbles played out their final vignette again and again and again.

Alternia was created before their eyes.

And finally, as Kanaya dissolved the dream bubbles and stitched natural space around them all again like she was sewing an impossible cosmic dress, studded with stars and battleships alike…  (The Sylph of Space bringing them home, where a true reckoning would be waiting to meet them and everybody got swept up into Feferi’s favorite hulking city-ship…)  Alternia as they knew it was dying.

The next Heiress challenge would come next, and then Alternia would be dead.


	10. Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHHHHHHH.  
> Hello again.  
> Happy Sunday (and Father's Day, at least where I am!) Welcome to the ~last chapter of this fic series!!!~ Geez. It barely feels real to me... And I hope it came out okay, ahahaha. Please forgive any mistakes I might've made! 
> 
> Thank you so, so, so much for reading. I'm honored that you'd put the time in to read something like this I made. Have a wonderful day, and I hope this fic has been a fun experience for you if you've gotten this far. :D!!! <3

A little grass had sprouted up between the splintered chessboard battleground tiles when Feferi and Meenah Peixes met for Alternia’s last motherfucking Heiress ascension duel.  A couple soft flowering weeds.  A brave, snaking bioluminescent vine or two.  You know.  It felt like a lot more fucking time had passed them by than Gamzee rightly knew, just then, but maybe that was the way shit got the longer a brother lived. 

The world tended to move on, somehow.  Alternia would move on the same as Earth, the same as anyplace else beyond the horrorterrors’ twitching void.  The battlefield had changed, and so had both the trolls facing each other across it, tridents resting cold against the dull glisten of their palm-scales.  Jade had set up one of her teleportation forcefields to swallow that place, you know…  Like the two Empresses were trapped in somebody’s electric crackling snow-globe, about to shake themselves right up into so much blood.  Nobody’d be running the fuck off, this time.  There would be death and an empire stolen back, whoever won.  Gamzee figured everybody got that noise clear as the motherfucking gospel used to be.  He and the rest of his friends stood at Feferi’s back, wearing uniforms and medals he wouldn’t have been able to name.  Karkat had a hand resting against the small of his back.  Steadying him, felt like.  Steadying Gamzee’s sopor-shaking legs and Karkat’s own self, all at the same fucking time.

Nobody’d cleaned up the sour fuchsia blood from that last duel, near the start of their war…   Would’ve been disrespectful or some shit, and so those Empresses circled each other from across long-flaking scabs.  Maybe Her Imperious Condescension knew Feferi wouldn’t die, whatever she did.  She tasted just how completely she’d been betrayed, now: how the horrorterrors had chosen a new champion.  How the void slithered out from deep inside Feferi’s gills, yeah, and how sometimes her shadow seemed to belong to something unraveling with a thousand woven tentacles, a thousand glassy knowing eyes.  Feferi wavered, if a brother tried to look at her too closely.  Not quite real, anymore, and getting less real all the time.

That was the price she’d paid, pretty fucking long ago, now.  Remember, bro?

Feferi had painted her lips like bubblegum, that night, getting herself all ready.  She had brushed her scales with poison, again, and Sollux had pinned up her hair with seashells and little clips he’d made that looked like crystalline honeycomb.  Feferi said, “It’s time, Meenah,” and Gamzee felt like maybe everyone throughout Alternian space heard her call the Empress by her true name just like Terezi fucking said would come to be.  The challenge was being broadcasted out to all the motherfucking haven-cities, after all.  Eridan flinched, and Sollux nodded, and Karkat clenched his hand all up in Gamzee’s fanciest polka-dot jacket.

Gamzee shifted, swallowed hard.  He watched Feferi, and he watched his friends spread in a row underneath Alternia’s dizzy sherbet-sweet sky.  It had been so long since he’d stood on their home planet’s own soil and smelled the sea in the air.  Dave was still limping a little from how the Condesce’s trident had twisted deep, deep into his leg; Aradia grinned at Gamzee all wide-eyed and eager when she saw him looking.  Aradia was ready.  Feferi was ready.  Terezi had told them that this was the night, and their galaxy would change as quickly as soft bare feet over cracked tile.  As quickly as a clash of tridents in the air. 

Tridents and chilly royal meat.  Tridents and bone.

Gamzee thought one last time about how it had felt being Meenah Peixes in the dream bubbles…  Choosing to destroy her friends – destroy all that remained of Beforus – for some chance at a future.  For a chance at Alternia.  He wondered how it would’ve felt carrying that memory around everywhere, like a sore that kept scraping against a brother’s teeth…  Like how he’d always remembered skulking around in a haunted, rattling vent, maybe, knowing too much of what the twisted-up puppet draped over his back whispered even before he’d ever truly heard its voice.  Had the Condesce completely given up on that game that might’ve made a choice like her other self’s worth it?  How was she still taunting Feferi with sneers and fish puns, even after they’d dragged her here to face her final Heiress?

Did Meenah really think she could win, now, or was she just putting on one last show?  Flashing her too-much jewelry, tossing her hair.  Staring the world down with eyes that had seen planets drown, cities flooded like the meal block counter that one time Gamzee accidentally overwatered Jade’s potted flowers.

They fought, of course, those Empresses.  It didn’t last so motherfucking long, this time.  Gamzee thought he recognized a few of Nepeta’s best moves in the way Feferi dodged and struck.  Maybe the Condesce couldn’t help but take her seriously now, even if part of her might always hope the silly little upstart would stumble at the end.

Her Imperious Condescension stabbed her trident through Feferi’s foot, and tore a few sobbing streaks in her cheek.  She said she didn’t regret anything, and Gamzee thought he knew she was lying.  She said she just _knew_ Feferi would destroy everything she’d built, everything she’d been preparing for, and she said it with so much venom.  Venom meant for Feferi, sure, but not _only_ for Feferi.  It was a deeper thing than that, and cold as Alternia’s darkest seas.

That venom roared itself out again and again throughout their final battle – when Feferi picked herself up, mostly, or landed the sort of hit such a young troll shouldn’t have been able to swing.  Feferi crunched her neck back into place from where it had been snapped; Feferi smoothed down her skirts even when she should have been just about bled out.  She was smiling, too, through some of it – maybe a little tired, but otherwise just shaking the death out of her bones.  The Condesce tried to tear her Heiress’s throat out with those spindly polished teeth of hers by the end, but of course Feferi’s scales left burning, lightning-scar sores down her Ancestor’s beautiful painted jaw.  Meenah had probably known that was coming, but just like everything else that’d left her broken she did it anyway. 

End the world, bite through the poison, take everything down with you.

When Feferi pinned the Empress down with her bleeding foot, this time – when she hefted her trident up so it caught the moonlight, and Gamzee remembered those same moons juggling themselves as they all watched breathless – Her Imperious Condescension couldn’t squirm away.  Maybe she tried, or maybe she just spit despair and bared her poison-steaming deep-ocean fangs.  Not a smile, no.  Nothing like a smile at all. 

Feferi gutted her Ancestor, and walked away with Sollux’s honeycomb clips dangling loosely in her hair, as if they were just about to clatter off onto the chessboard floor.  _Just about_ , but not quite.  She was soaked in priceless royal blood, and as the crowd roared for her – as the cameras flashed and the faithful howled hymns and some savvy motherfuckers hawked their Heiress Feferi merch –  for a second everyone saw what she was becoming.  Her living skin fell away, and their new Empress was one of the eldritch gods.  She was practically her own lusus; she was a stranger, and she was one of those that had been watching all the time.  Just behind the mascara, just behind the heaving breath and the dimpled elbows and all that desperate kindness.  Feferi had traded herself to the void, after all.  Traded herself for this chance, in just the same was as Meenah had traded all her motherfucking friends before her.

And the void would come for Feferi, even if not right away.  She wouldn’t have an eternity with her people the way Her Imperious Condescension had, but she would do what she could.  Of course she would, right?  Feferi would try to prepare them – try to reshape Alternia – for the future she promised.  Not Beforus, that kindly ruinous world she’d created all on her own, but something more.

And then?

Well, and then she wouldn’t belong among the breathing anymore, though of course she would never, never die.

Her Ethereal Resurrection, wasn’t she? 

There was always gonna be a price, for shit like that.   

Feferi Peixes pulled her own face back on before even a full second had passed, and dabbed at the blood there with her hand.  She greeted her people for the first time as a true, solitary Empress, and spoke what reassuring words she knew.  About Alternia’s death; about the gory trident held shaking in her own claws.  The imperial forces pledged their service to her, all ritualistic and final this time…  They offered their necks for Feferi to slice open if she felt like it – (she didn’t) – and the drones gathered close as if they wanted to become her second monstrous shadow.  Everybody got themselves interviewed.  Gamzee’s crew did a worship circus show, and Sollux had to clear a path for Feferi to get away, after a while, back to her ship and a little healing quiet.  That wasn’t the first time her skin had slipped off, Gamzee knew that shit, and it sure as fuck wouldn’t be the last.  Sollux had a pile waiting for her, and wasn’t afraid to psionic-blast paparazzi out of the way to get there…  Though Feferi didn’t exactly go for that last part, mind you.

There it is, brother.

The end of things, and the beginning.

…

Gamzee Makara and all his best motherfucking friends got together off and on, over the sweeps to come.  More than some motherfuckers seemed to expect, even knowing all the shit they’d been through.  More than Gamzee’d known how to hope for, honestly, and Karkat sometimes shook his head all softly laughing when he saw his moirail get surprised to be invited over and over again.  When they marked it on their shared calendar together, in a respite block full of honk horns and memos to respond to, fraying sentimental movie posters and enormous clown shoes.  Sometimes it was so’s Nepeta could introduce them to a new matesprit she’d found that Equius wanted to grill until they melted into a terrified, very-polite puddle on the floor…  Sometimes it was to do a weird Earth-movie marathon for what would’ve been John Egbert’s birthday if he hadn’t gotten all motherfucking culled sweeps and sweeps ago. 

This time, it was to celebrate the hatching of a brand-new baby Heiress.  She was such a fragile thing, still, and when Gamzee’d held her in one giant clown paint-smeary hand he’d been afraid she might suddenly squish.  He’d been so motherfucking careful, though.  Equius had perched at his shoulder, reminding him to, “Be _careful_ , Highblood!” all the time, so it wasn’t like he could’ve up and forgotten or anything. 

They were gathered together for a handful of nights, in an Alternian manor by the sea that looked suspiciously like the Lalonde Manor of a long time back and so many worlds away.  Gamzee waved at something that might’ve been his lusus way out in the ocean once or twice, though he didn’t think too hard on it…  And whatever it was didn’t swim any fucking closer.  Didn’t have to matter, Gamzee reminded himself.  Didn’t have to matter so much at all.

Gamzee’d eaten Earth food John made for everyone, even though the Heir of Breath’s robotic metal skin couldn’t exactly digest anything, yet – Jade was working on that shit…  He’d gotten an in-depth update on Nepeta’s always-evolving shipping charts, and met a couple of the latest alien beasts Tavros was taking care of.  He liked nursing lost things back to health, that Tavros, and if he minded the unintentionally swooning eyes Gamzee slipped him learning on all that he didn’t say a thing.  Seemed happy to see him, honestly.  Said he missed him, and they should get to video chatting more often.  Gamzee said yeah, fuck yeah, and Tav said it was nice that Gamzee could still have the same big sloppy smile as always.

Gamzee wasn’t completely clear on what all it might’ve meant, when Tavros’s voice got nostalgic and soft like that, but he was sure as fuck gonna bring it up to Karkat soon enough.  It’d been good to see Tavros though – was always fucking good to see him, to be real with a motherfucker.  

Feferi was there, too, although the change was coming for her even still.  She’d been working with a council, representatives gathered from across the worlds…  She’d been busier than anything lately, it felt like, although that night Gamzee sat for a little while and watched her play video games with Sollux and Eridan as though she _didn’t_ rule so much of their known space.  As though she hadn’t been learning how to hear her subjects’ voices better before it was too late to pass that shit on, and wasn’t getting closer and closer to drifting out of herself for good.  Her gauzy seafoam skirts had been bunched up around her knees, kneeling on the floor.    

Eridan had grumbled at Sollux, like, “You must be fuckin cheatin, somehow, Sol,” and Sollux had snickered with his eyes crackling playful electricity at the edges, like he’d forgotten everything he had to be nervous about for a few drifting hours at least. 

“You _wish_ I was cheating,” he’d corrected, “It’s so sad for you, isn’t it?”

It was something like that fighting game Gamzee remembered playing with Eridan and Sollux on their trip out to see the Juggling Eclipse, maybe, though probably a kinda sequel he hadn’t played yet.  Gamzee’s eyes might’ve glossed over a little, watching the fancy glittering explosions and mangled virtual limbs.  He’d been resting his chin on his propped up arms, a half-finished Faygo dangling in his hand and his best ringmaster-ish coat lost somewhere around the party.  Equius was gonna be so tenderly frustrated about that.  Gamzee’d imagined his kismesis’s sneer to come with a sort of bubbling anticipation.

He still hadn’t found his motherfucking coat by the time Karkat came to gather him up, away from their last night by the sea.  Said, “It’s almost morning, Gamzee.  Let’s go say bye to the baby Heiress and her mom-lusii or whatever, and then get some actual sleep.”

“Now, brother?”

“ _Yes_ fucking now.”  A pause.  “That okay?”

Gamzee chuckled, just a bit.  Said, “Sure, sure.  Works for me.”  Back when they were kids, Gamzee wouldn’t have expected Karkat to ask his motherfucking permission for anything, you know? Been a long time, since all that.

Karkat wasn’t much of an “party that goes on nights and nights” person, really.  He was already holding their ship’s keys and standing propped in the doorway when he called Gamzee over.  He was pointing out very logical motherfucking facts, like what that Gamzee had a worship circus puppet show to do the next evening, and he, himself, had to go take his council seat and argue shit with a lot of other yell-y dignitaries very soon.  It made sense, sure, but Gamzee would still be fucking sad to leave all the shifting light and laughter.  All the random-ass snacks Rose and Kanaya had left lying around on fancy platters to celebrate their new charge.  Their tiny squirming grub daughter, colder than cold and with little gills prickling at the side of what would someday become her neck. 

Feferi had decided that her own deep-sea horrorterror lusus shouldn’t raise this new Heiress for murder-culling and whispered fear…  Gl'bgolyb would lead her to the void, when the time came, and Alternia wouldn’t have to satisfy her hunger anymore.  Horrorterrors hadn’t been around on old lost Beforus, after all; Gl'bgolyb whispered that they’d wrangled her down to make Alternia what it was.  To win, to tempt fate, to bring on the blood.  So _really_ …  So really that meant Kanaya was designing little wiggler dresses, now, and Rose had both been trying to keep herself relatively sober _and_ read most of Alternia’s children’s books in preparation.  Really that meant they’d chosen a new princess’s name together, and there was a picture of their tiny fuchsia-bright grub charge on the manor’s mantle next to that one of them both dressed up all pretty for their Earth-style matespritship ceremony a couple sweeps back. 

Rose’s squirmy tentacle-cat Fiduspawn was still alive and prowling that place, too…  Gamzee thought he caught a glimpse of it ducking behind some lurking wizard statues.  There were familiar novels on the shelves, and familiar knitting needles stabbed into some yarn by the fireplace.  And if the little, squirming Heiress heard horrorterror voices, inherited from Feferi, from Meenah before her?  Well, then one of her dual-lusii heard ‘em, too. 

Gamzee hugged Rose before they left, and Terezi slipped something strange into Karkat’s coat pocket for a kinda scavenger hunt thing she was doing around the manor with Dave.  Something Karkat said set her off cackling, and they ended up sticking around for another half hour or so.  Gamzee finished off his Faygo and grabbed another one; Karkat reenacted ridiculous moments from recent council meetings, getting more into that shit than he’d probably ever wanna admit.

It seemed like Vriska was winning Dave and Terezi’s scavenger hunt thing, really.  She snatched that weird something out of Karkat’s pocket without him even fucking knowing on it until later, after all.  Slipped through their conversation real quick, drawling about how all three of Scourge Sisters plus Dave had to be nice and ready for their trip off to Earth soon enough – so get packing, losers! – while tossing her hair over her shoulder more dramatically than any of Eridan’s capes could’ve managed.  Dave shot her some sharp eyes behind his coolkid shades and Terezi called back, “You’re not my lusus, Serket!” like it was a routine they'd acted out a bunch of times before.

Gamzee didn’t ask what all they’d be doing back on the humans’ homeworld, yet.  He remembered Lil Cal moving like oily-quick shadow around Dave’s brother’s hive and shuddered a little, deep in his bones.  He cupped his cheek in his palm and got clown paint smudged all over his fingers; he snickered at Karkat’s councilor impressions, and said shit like, “Do the one about those shipping licenses and the motherfucking dirty hate-flirting e-mails, bro.  They’ll love that shit.”                

And then they finally headed out, and the warmth of New Lalonde Manor got farther and farther behind them.  Their ship was parked down the road some, and they made their way over to it with their feet sinking into the sand and a gentle wind all tangling in their hair.  Gamzee thought he heard Eridan wailing, “Goddammit, Sol!” through the door, down the hall.  Couldn’t be completely sure, but that shit felt about right.  The sky was deep and full of clouds…  The waves looked like they’d been shaped from dark, shifting glass.

This new Heiress would be raised with the council to guide her just the same as their motherfucking Empress; she’d be raised without any need to cull night-to-night, and with a human alien as one of her dual-lusii.  It was a strange new Alternia – believe _that_ , brother – though maybe this all was no stranger than the idea of a council made up of aliens and mutant-bloods working to shape the future of their star systems.  Maybe no stranger than the idea that Gamzee’s circus would be performing Cimyra Slapzo’s shadow puppet show again not twenty-four hours later…   And after carting the guy around in their holding cell for ages, binding up his fucking chucklevoodoos and getting preached about as heretics, too.  Gamzee needed Heceta’s blood-magics to get it working right, but it’d turned out to be a whimsical, heartbroken little fairytale, and something about one of their own preaching through the puppets had brought more Subjugglators into their reborn church than even Slapzo himself would’ve probably thought. 

Lots of visions of Beforus, in that motherfucking fairytale; lots of writhing fearful many-faced shadow things, and lots of frustrated hope.  It was the story of a brother that found himself broken apart and warped into a monster, a patchwork of gospel he’d never even dreamt could be wrong.  Slapzo’s story, people thought, though Gamzee still felt uncomfortable holding those finger puppets and feeling so much of a douchey Subjugglator General’s heart act itself out in his hands.  The first time Gamzee and Heceta had watched that puppet show play itself out together, it had been just all for respecting a brother in faith.  Respecting their blood.  But they played it again and again, now, like the gift that it was – they’d played it for Rose Lalonde, too, and she’d ended up sort of sad she hadn’t been able to commission Slapzo to make a shadow-puppet rendition of one of Kanaya’s vampire books as a gift or something.

Yeah, no.  Would’ve been pretty motherfucking sweet, though, Gamzee’d agreed.

His steps swayed a little, then.  Back on the beach – heading away from the newly-hatched Heiress’s party and back to the ship with Karkat’s latest romcom movie script in the space glove compartment.  As Karkat held out his hand – _“Come on, Gamzee, don’t fall on your face or anything now”–_ it felt sort of familiar…  Like a time before their world changed.  On a grey beach not too different than that one, Karkat Vantas had grabbed on to Gamzee’s wrist and led him off to the Juggling Eclipse.  Led him to family, and a world beyond his waiting.  Led him to a ship sorta like the one they were stumbling to now, except that it wasn’t exactly made to be parked in a haven-city garage and/or the guts of Gamzee’s newest worship circus. 

Now, Karkat grabbed Gamzee’s wrist, again, and pulled him forward just like before.  Everything had changed, but in some ways…  In ways that mattered to Gamzee the same as his worshipful callings and his fizzing blood and the whimsical creaking one-wheel device stuffed in his inventory…   Nothing had changed at all.   They’d seen the Juggling Eclipse spin itself away all impossibly, mirthful as the twofold gods.  They’d traveled to a planet that shouldn’t have even fucking existed, created and uncreated by some world-shaping game they’d never been able to play.  They’d gone into the void and back again –into their own memories and back again – and Karkat still had so many of Gamzee’s long-distance venting messages saved on his husktop for some inexplicable, miraculous reason.  Gamzee knew it.  He’d seen that shit with his own two eyes.

They’d destroyed Alternia and brought it swimming back to life again, somehow.  Against reason; against blood-right…  Celebrating their own mistake of a universe for what it was. 

Karkat squeezed Gamzee’s wrist, just a little, though his hand couldn’t hope to curl all the way around it anymore.  His skin was so, so warm.

It was time to go home.


End file.
